


The Ordinary World

by Anti_kate



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood and Injury, But sometimes ghost stories have happy endings, Horror Elements, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Journey into the Underworld, M/M, Smut, Temporary Character Death, What if Aziraphale died in the bookshop fire, Whump, gratuitous plant death, non-linear storytelling, this is a ghost story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:21:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 24,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27107878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anti_kate/pseuds/Anti_kate
Summary: He couldn’t quite remember what Aziraphale smelled like anymore, the particular combination of fresh bread and sea salt and cedarwood, the caramelized sugar of crème brûlée. But even though he couldn’t remember the scent precisely, he knew the bookshop didn’t smell right. It didn’t smell like Aziraphale. It was as if he’d never been there at all.Aziraphale disappears the night of the bookshop fire, and Crowley is left alone and grieving. But death is not always the end.Written for Racketghost's Spooky Prompt series.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 329
Kudos: 336
Collections: Racket’s 13 Days of Halloween





	1. Demon Haunted

**Author's Note:**

> This fic begins with the unhappy premise that Aziraphale died, genuinely, in the bookshop fire, and that Crowley averted the apocalypse alone. 
> 
> However, it isn’t tagged with Major Character Death, because this story has a happy ending (I absolutely promise). Without giving away the plot, sometimes people do make it out alive. That said, for most of this story Aziraphale is technically a ghost and Crowley is having a bad time, so please heed the tags. 
> 
> Thank you, as always, to my wonderful beta NarumiKaiko for helping this actually make some sort of sense.

The bookshop wasn’t haunted, but it might as well have been.

The windows had always been dirty; the interior dim and stacked with books that seemed to defy gravity, dust motes thick in the air. There had been an air of mild hostility about it, even when the bookseller had been there.

But it had never felt wrong before.

Now it sat empty and silent, blackened teeth in the rictus of a frozen grin.

People in the neighbourhood had found it unburnt the day after the world hadn’t ended, even though some of them remembered it burning. Some of them had stood in the street as the whole place went up like a bonfire and the firefighters had struggled to contain the blaze. Some of them had seen a man stagger from the building, charred and dripping, still alive despite the ferocity of the flames.

Some of them remembered when reality had seemed to twist and shudder and snap, but the human mind is good at shutting away things that don’t fit. Those who remembered decided it was a dream or a hallucination or a scene from an old movie—they convinced themselves there hadn’t been a day when the sky had turned dark as sackcloth and ashes, and that continents and monsters had not risen from the sea. The end days had come and gone again, as a child breathed in and out, and most of humanity didn’t even notice.

Not everything was reset.

The bookshop did not reopen, but lights flickered inside and something moved within it. And anyone who walked past it felt something thick and heavy and oppressive, cold pressing against their skin. The feeling would pass again as they continued on their way, but people began crossing the road before they reached the store, as if a hole had opened up on the pavement.

And there was a hole in the bookshop, a physical one; a gap in reality where there had once been something solid, and real. Where there had once been someone, now there was his absence.

Something moved in the bookshop, but it wasn’t a ghost.

* * *

Crowley wasn’t sure how long he’d been drunk. Sometime between days and weeks.

He couldn’t bring himself to sit on the sofa where they’d passed so many evenings, so he sat on the thin rug on the bookshop floor. He probably slept there too, though it was more like passing out than actually sleeping. He’d wake, find a bottle, drink again. The light changed—grey filtered sunshine sliding into the yellowed glow of streetlights in something like a pattern. Night and day, day and night. They just kept coming.

He didn’t need to sleep. He didn’t need to worry about his liver, either. He didn’t need to worry about drinking himself into a coma, about the _delirium tremens,_ about jaundice and organ failure. And even if he’d had a functioning human anatomy—blood, bones, a heart worth breaking—he wouldn’t have stopped. He clutched onto the bottle like a sinking life-raft or a hand reaching out through the dark, but there was nothing there but the bottle.

The thing was. He couldn’t leave. The bookshop was all that was left.

But it smelled wrong. It smelled of dust and aging paper and glue and the whiskey Crowley had spilled on the rug. It smelled of age and neglected books and poor housecleaning, like any other used bookstore in London.

He couldn’t quite remember what Aziraphale smelled like anymore, the particular combination of fresh bread and sea salt and cedarwood, the caramelized sugar of a crème brûlée. But even though he couldn’t remember the scent precisely, he knew the bookshop didn’t smell right. It didn’t smell like Aziraphale. It was as if he’d never been there at all.

He was _gone._ Not that Crowley knew how, all he knew was that the day the world hadn't ended Aziraphale had been ripped from existence.

Crowley had felt the universe tear, felt the birth of a new black hole. He’d rushed to the bookshop, terrified and already sure, and it had been on fire and Aziraphale had been gone. Crowley had still run in and screamed the angel’s name, even as he knew. And after the fire, he’d sat in the pub and drank and drank, because Aziraphale was _gone._

Somehow, through his drunken haze, he’d opened the book he'd found in the bookshop and there had been Aziraphale’s notes. There, in his immaculate handwriting was the address in Tadfield, the clues he’d deciphered. Brilliant, stupid angel, who’d figured it all out and it still hadn’t been enough. In that moment, with the world ending, Crowley knew that no matter what happened he was fucked. So he'd reasoned, he might as well try. Aziraphale would have wanted him to do _something._

He’d driven the burning M25 alone, walked onto the airfield tarmac alone, held Adam’s hand alone, and then gone back to London alone. Gone to his flat alone, passed out from exhaustion. He'd woken up the next day, gone to the bookshop, and found it empty.

“Why didn’t you bring him back,” Crowley had raged down the phone at the Antichrist. “You brought everything else back!”

The boy made a small noise, like a sigh. “Couldn’t. Some things just aren’t possible. You’ll have to figure it out yourself.”

After that, when Crowley tried to call him, he’d found himself connected to a dog grooming salon in Milton Keynes.

He’d tried to go to Tadfield to find the boy, but had ended up driving in circles pointlessly, never making it any nearer the village than a service station 10 miles away. The roads twisted away from the town under the Bentley’s wheels, and the street signs all said “I can’t help you” and “Go home” and “You won’t find him here” and "It will take time". He’d finally given up after two days of circling, eyes hot and burning with exhaustion and frustration.

Aziraphale was gone.

The bookshop was still here, unburnt, and Aziraphale wasn’t. He wasn’t in heaven—he had been accidentally discorporated a few times over their long years on Earth, and even though he’d been gone he hadn’t been _gone,_ not like this. Not like a severed limb. 

And he definitely wasn’t in hell. Crowley wasn’t popular down there, but he still had demons who owed him, and one phone call had confirmed it. That’s when he’d started drinking again, and he hadn’t stopped since.

Aziraphale wasn’t anywhere. Fucking gone, like he’d never even been.

Never in six thousand years had Crowley considered that the world might end not with a bang or a whimper but with the sun shining bright and clear, the sky full of birds, eight billion human hearts beating on, nothing changed for anyone else. That there would be an apocalypse, except it would only be his own. A personal Armageddon.

He’d imagined hell’s victory, and heaven’s too, and all the ways they might be forced to watch the other lose. Most often he imagined Aziraphale standing over him with a flaming sword.

But he’d never imagined this.

He sat on the floor, and drank. At some point he began smashing bottles against the nearest bookcase, swept a whole shelf of books onto the floor, kicked over a hatstand full of scrolls.

Aziraphale wouldn’t have liked that, he thought muzzily, but Aziraphale wasn’t going to have opinions about anything ever again. That had set him amongst the books, and he’d grown claws long enough to shred cardboard and leather and paper, and he ripped them apart in great handfuls, and he snarled and knocked over another shelf and kicked at it, and he wasn’t drunk enough yet, he’d never be drunk enough, and he wondered not-so-idly if the tartan thermos back at his flat would have enough holy water left in it, he only needed enough for a mouthful—

He must have passed out again, because he woke, sometime in the middle of the night. Outside the usual hum of traffic was silent, and a yellowish streetlight shone in through one of the front windows.

For a moment, he wasn’t sure what had woken him. Then he heard a noise, somewhere back in the stacks. There was no-one here but him, there couldn’t be, the bookshop wouldn’t have just admitted anyone else, not with Crowley within.

Demons weren’t afraid of darkness, or noises. Crowley knew what the worst things were, knew the shape of them, had walked among them. He knew hell wasn’t some Boschian vision of tortured bodies and outlandish hybrids but a grim, repetitive dullness; cubicles and paperwork and interminable queues. Even torture grew tedious over time.

The noise came again, a soft brushing like a coat-sleeve against a shelf. And there again, what might be the sound of someone slowly, carefully, removing a book from a shelf. The turning of a page. More clearly now, a footstep. A measured tread, with a slight scuff.

He knew there weren’t such things as ghosts, as hauntings, as creatures from beyond the grave. He’d seen Death at work. He knew no-one got out alive.

He wasn’t afraid, and he knew he wasn’t afraid, but he lay on the threadbare rug and in his chest his useless, pointless heart hammered. In the silence, he heard what sounded like a breath, or was it just his own blood rushing in his ears?

A scent hung in the air, the merest hint of sweetness. Burnt caramel.

If there was something there, Crowley wasn’t afraid.

But his treacherous body sent adrenaline coursing through his veins and his skin prickled and his breath came faster and faster, and he felt cold and alone.

He wasn’t afraid, but he lay still, and listened to what could have been wind outside, a building settling into its foundations, a distant train moving in the metro. But it wasn’t.

He wasn’t afraid, because if hell or heaven came for him now, it didn’t matter.

Slowly, he eased himself upright, trying to move without making a noise. Another footstep, closer now. As if someone was holding a book, and stepping absent-mindedly through the shelves as they read it.

He was on his knees now, his movements muffled by the thick carpet below. Darkness clung to every shelf in the back of the bookshop but he could see well enough, and something _moved,_ something moon-pale and fluttering just beyond the edges of his sight.

And then, the faintest of voices, a breath. “There you are.”

He lurched up to his feet and staggered into the darkness, behind the shelves, into the depths of the bookshop. “Aziraphale!”

No-one stood between the shelves. Nothing moved, or whispered. That sugar-sweet smell of scorched caramel had disappeared.

He turned—there was nothing behind him either.

If something had walked through the shelves, it was gone now.

Except.

Except on the floor, where there’d been nothing before—he was sure of that, Aziraphale would never have left one of his treasures on the bloody floor where any oaf might step on it—a book lay open on the parquetry.

Crowley knelt and took it in his hands, and because it seemed important somehow he made sure not to lose the place as he staggered back, fingers in between the pages. He sat down on the thin rug, and under the greasy, hollow light from outside, he read.  
  



	2. Of His Bones

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Crowley knew that wasn’t right, but the Globe was full of strange shadows he couldn’t see if he looked directly for them, and so he couldn’t look away from Aziraphale, because then he’d… then he’d…_
> 
> Strange dreams and angel-winged mugs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Today's prompt in the 13 days of Halloween list is Bones, so, you know, there is a CW on this chapter for bones, a bit of body horror and on-going general misery.

“Alas,” Burbage was saying to Yorick’s skull but he seemed to have forgotten the rest of the soliloquy, and so he said it again, and again. “Alas. Alas.”

“Oh dear,” Aziraphale fretted. “Do you think I should feed him his line? Richard, dear boy, it’s _alas, full fathom five thy father lies, of his bones are coral made, those are pearls that were his eyes.”_

Crowley knew that wasn’t right, but the Globe was full of strange shadows he couldn’t see if he looked directly for them, and so he couldn’t look away from Aziraphale, because then he’d… then he’d…

_Crowley._

“Cocoa?” Aziraphale said, offering him a sip of oily, too-red liquid from an angel-winged mug.

“Nah,” Crowley said, still too afraid to look away from Aziraphale’s pale hair, glinting in the sunlight; the silver sheen of his doublet, the ruffles curling at his throat. In the corners of his vision the shadows seethed.

“Do you know why they call it bone china?” Aziraphale lifted the mug in his hand, the same way Burbage held aloft Yorick’s whitened skull.

“Just a wild guess here, is it because it’s made of bones?” Crowley’s hands ached from holding them at his sides for so long. Five and a half thousand years he’d been holding them, fisted at his sides, so he didn’t reach out and touch. 

“Because it’s made of bones!” Aziraphale laughed, delighted in that way he was when Crowley was particularly agreeable. “You see they take the excess bones from slaughterhouses, and they bake them, like a rather macabre cake, and then they grind them into powder. And then they take that bone ash and mix it with clay, and turn it into delightful little cups and saucers. It’s called vitrification, you know, when the green china is cooked, because it turns into glass. Imagine bones being turned into glass. Isn’t that lovely?” He took a sip of his cocoa and hummed.

“Alas!” Burbage said on the stage, loud enough this time that Crowley couldn’t help but look up at him—just one flick of his eyes to where the actor stood, turning the skull in his hands with puzzlement—but that was enough because when he looked back the shadows had coiled at Aziraphale’s feet, around his satiny shoes and the cream wool stockings that smoothed over his calves. And his hair didn’t catch the sunlight anymore, it looked less like the white of a dove or a cloud than the white of the mug in his hands. 

“Osteomancy,” Aziraphale said, and his voice sounded as if he was speaking from far away. “That’s when you divine the future by throwing the bones.”

“Fortune telling is complete nonsense,” Crowley replied, automatically, refusing to look anywhere but the soft curve of Aziraphale’s chin, the tilt of his nose. The shadows at his feet writhed.

“Alas,” Burbage said from the stage, only it might have been the caw of a bird instead and Crowley thought he saw the fluttering of dark feathers where the man had stood. 

“I think there’s something wrong with my bones.” Aziraphale held up his hands, studying them critically. “Would you look and tell me, Crowley?” 

“Yes, anything angel,” Crowley said, trying to ignore the way the shadows were creeping up Aziraphale’s legs and the cawing from the Burbage-bird on the stage.

“Oh good,” Aziraphale said, relieved and fond. But before Crowley could stop him he pulled off the skin of one of his hands and underneath his bones weren’t made of glass but of nothing at all, nothing but darkness without even a single star, and Crowley opened his mouth to yell but—

He sat upright and the book on his chest thudded to the floor.

Outside he heard traffic and the rumble of busses and voices and somewhere the distant strains of inappropriate club music. Or maybe not, he had no idea what time it was.

He must have fallen asleep (passed out, whiskey bottle finally bone dry) as he was reading the book. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, oxblood leather cover, probably one of the horrifically expensive ones, open to the first page of _Hamlet._

Now he looked down at it where it had fallen on the floor, still on the page he’d been reading the last night. The words blurred under his whiskey-soaked eyes. _There are more things in heaven and earth Horatio than dreamt of…_

“Fuck off,” he said to the book, to the empty echoing bookshop, to the sounds of life going on outside. “Fuck. Off. I always hated Hamlet, you know I hated it, it’s so fucking miserable, I only did it because you gave me those ridiculous puppy dog eyes, I would have crawled through hell on my belly for you, you must have known that...”

He shut the book carefully now, and stood up, not entirely sure his legs would take his weight, but he managed it anyway. The room lurched, and he vaguely thought he might be sick. He could have willed it away with a snap of his fingers, but he wanted to feel the ache and burn, the roiling in his guts. 

Dozens of empties were strewn across the old rug, and more on the sofa, and one smashed on the floor. And there was the shameful pile of books he’d clawed at beside the toppled bookcase. He’d made a mess, he’d made such an incredible mess, and Aziraphale would be incandescent with rage—

But he wouldn’t. He’d never pull that disapproving face at Crowley again. He was gone.

Crowley clicked his fingers and the bottles disappeared into next door’s recycling bin, and the books were whole again and back on the shelves, in what passed for order.

“In case you’ve forgotten,” he said to the dust motes and the books and the scrolls and one of those horrible angel-winged mugs (which probably had a ring of dried-out cocoa still in it, because apparently Adam fucking Young could bring back everything but the one thing that mattered), “In case you’ve forgotten I’m a demon and I know you’re not really here, because that’s not what happens to the likes of us when we… when we…” the words lodged his throat, like the jagged edges of a fishbone caught inside his trachea. 

“When we go, we go,” he kept talking, hoarsely, because that was better than the alternative, “there’s no heaven or hell for us. So you’re definitely not fucking here, all right? Have we got that clear?”

The everyday outside noises seemed to have faded to nothing, and the bookshop felt like an in-drawn breath. 

“You can’t be here,” Crowley said, and it came out as a whisper. “I don’t know what it would mean, if you were here—”

For a moment, his words hung in space, and then something crashed at the back of the shop. He moved before he could tell himself not too, and in a few steps he was in the doorway to the back room. On the floor the rest of Aziraphale’s ridiculous collection of angel-winged mugs lay in a broken heap, as if they’d just been thrown from the ceiling, dashed to pieces by someone in a fit of pique. 

Crowley dropped to his knees and picked up a shard of white wing. He closed his hand around it, ignoring the sting of its sharp edges cutting into his palm. 

“You’re not here,” he whispered into the listening stillness of the shop. “I’d know if you were really here. I’d have to know.”

_Crowley._

_Listen._   
  



	3. The Avenues of the Dead

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Crowley hated all that cod latin chanting bullshit, all that empty mysticism. It was bad enough that he was here prowling around Highgate Cemetery at fucking midnight, like some sort of ridiculous gothic cliche. As if he should have worn widow’s weeds, as if he was coming here to throw himself into an open grave, wrap his arms around his lover’s cold neck, and beg him not to leave him here alone._
> 
> Crowley summons Death. It goes about as well as you'd expect.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was written for the "graveyard" prompt for the lovely Racketghost's 13 days of Halloween event.  
> CW: a brief description of ritual self-harm and some blood.

The tap of Crowley’s boot heels echoed off the marble walls of the Egyptian Avenue in the heart of Highgate Cemetery, and in the distance he heard what might have been foxes yipping, and the never-ceasing bloodrush of traffic. 

By human standards, he was the worst thing that walked in London’s shadow borough, but he still felt as if he was under observation here, as if he was an interloper. As if something older and darker stalked him through the streets of the dead. 

He remembered when they’d planned the cemeteries as some way to keep up with the crisis of having too many corpses, with that Victorian zeal for civic improvement. He’d told Beelzebub he’d had words in the ears of various architects and planners about the layout of the place and fed them nonsense about the concentration of occult powers or something. It’s a cauldron of misery, he’d said, and he’d got another bloody commendation.

The truth was there was nothing here that hasn’t been born of the human heart. Grief, fear, and after enough time passed, the awful inevitability of human bodies turning back into the base matter of the world. For dust thou art, and all that. 

_Crowley._

He smoked his cigarette down to the end and stubbed it out under his toe, before walking into the shadowy recesses of the terrace catacombs. At the bottom of the stairs something moved in the dark and for a second he almost lost his nerve, but then he saw it was a fox, baring its teeth at him, eyes shining faintly. They looked at each other for a span that could have been a second or a minute, and then the fox turned and dashed off into the depths. 

He breathed again, and growled at himself, “Get on with it, Crowley,” and continued his descent. He wasn’t here for the spooky ambiance and wildlife encounters. 

Summoning rituals written by humans were mostly bollocks but sometimes they stumbled onto ancient and terrible truths, and sometimes, when one of them managed to survive madness long enough, they wrote down their methods. The Ars Goetia and Heptameron and The Book of Lies all contained enough material to get a foolish human into no end of trouble.

Crowley hated all that cod latin chanting bullshit, all that empty mysticism. It was bad enough that he was here prowling around Highgate Cemetery at fucking midnight, like some sort of ridiculous gothic cliche. As if he should have worn widow’s weeds, as if he was coming here to throw himself into an open grave, wrap his arms around his lover’s cold neck, and beg him not to leave him here alone. 

_Aren’t you?_

“No I am bloody well not,” he said into the darkness. 

But there were still some things that needed to be done. The barest bones of a ritual, marks and words and blood. 

Blood was always necessary.

At the intersection of two vaulted galleries he stopped. The darkness clung thick and black and a human would have been completely blind, but he could see well enough to kneel on the floor and trace out a series of sigils in white chalk. 

Then he took off his jacket and tossed it behind him, and rolled up both sleeves. First one, then another, above his elbows. He was stalling, he knew, but he knelt for a moment longer without moving.

_Are you sure about this?_

No he was not fucking sure. But he had to do something, he couldn’t just sit in the bookshop going insane, drinking himself towards eternity alone. (There were always those last few drops of holy water, back in his flat, the last of his insurance policy.)

He’d thought about trying to locate a ceremonial dagger somewhere but the shard of the angel-winged mug was sharp enough, and there was something morbidly appropriate about it that he didn’t want to think too hard about. So he took it from the pocket of his jeans, and set the jagged tip to the soft skin on the inside of his right forearm, and before he could stop himself, slashed into his own skin. 

It hurt, it really hurt. But some part of him was glad of that. He hadn’t made it to the bookshop on time. What was a little gash in the skin compared to that?

He swore and hissed but dug the shard in further until blood welled up—or something akin to blood, he didn’t know exactly, perhaps it was ichor or something else, all he knew was that it was _power—_ and he held his hand over the sigil and let it drip down his fingers.

As soon as the blood hit the sigil the chalk lines seemed to drink it up and turn a dark, sullen red. He moved his hand across the writing on the floor, and as he dripped more of his blood across the sigils the chalk began to glow like low coals.

“I summon thee, Death, to my side, etcetera etcetera.”

A wind rushed through the catacombs and Crowley took a breath, and another, but nothing else happened. “Come on, you bastard, I’m evoking your name. Death. I know you can hear me and I need to talk to you!”

Summoning needed three evocations, he remembered, so he spoke again. “Death, you tedious old pile of rags, come to me.”

Something creaked, in the darkness beyond the glowing sigils, a sound like the opening of an old door, then something flickered and between one of Crowley’s heartbeats and the next He was standing there.

“DEMON CROWLEY,” Death said, and even though Crowley was not afraid, he swallowed, and lurched to his feet. “WHY DO YOU CALL UPON ME, AFTER YOU ROBBED ME OF MY GREAT HARVEST?”

“Yeah,” Crowley said, holding his aching arm to his chest. “You’ll get them all anyway, eventually.”

Last time he’d seen Death He’d been in motorcycle leathers and a dark-visored helmet. This time He’d gone for the classic Grim Reaper, a grinning skull in a ragged dark shroud, which should have been ridiculous. But it wasn’t. Nothing about this was funny at all. 

“ANSWER ME. WHY DID YOU SUMMON ME?”

Crowley hesitated, and looked up into the place where Death’s eyes were twin pits of absolutely nothing. “My—the angel. I want to know what happened to him. He—he’s gone, and I don’t know where, and I need to know how to find him. You must have been there when he… when he went. You come for everything in the end.”

For an immeasurable time, Death considered this. “THE PRINCIPALITY AZIRAPHALE.” His name, from that grinning mouth, on that breath of the charnel house and the devouring dark—it was obscene. Crowley hated it. But he nodded, anyway, and Death considered him again, and then inclined his head, and some tiny part of Crowley flared with what might have been hope. 

That feeling lasted only until Death spoke once more. “AND WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO TRADE WITH ME, DEMON, FOR THE INFORMATION YOU SEEK?”

Crowley wondered if this was what being suffocated was like, being choked slowly and surely and painfully. He set his jaw, tilted his head. “Why don’t we skip that, and you just tell me?”

A sound creaked from Death’s jaws. It might have been a laugh. It probably wasn’t. “I DO NOT GIVE THINGS AWAY. THERE MUST BE A TRADE.”

Crowley could feel the blood from his arm soaking through his shirt, and he gritted his teeth against another wave of pain. “I don’t suppose you’ve got any need for a wristwatch, do you? Or a collection of every Just William ever printed? I’m fresh out of virgin sacrifices right now.”

Death shifted slightly. “I DO NOT DEAL IN HUMAN EPHEMERA. BUT THERE IS SOMETHING ELSE.”

Crowley felt like the fox he’d seen before, trapped, unwary, unwilling, but in his case baring his fangs and running would be utterly pointless. After all, he was the summoner. He had to see it through. He had to _know._

_Crowley._

“What did you have in mind?” 

“THERE ARE … LIVES IN YOUR CARE. SMALL LIVES, QUIET LIVES, BUT LIVES NONETHELESS. I WILL ACCEPT THEM, AND TELL YOU WHAT I KNOW.” Death lifted a skeletal hand and gestured, vaguely.

It took Crowley rather longer than it should have to understand what this meant, and when he did, his stomach turned. “My plants,” he said, slowly. Just plants, one part of him argued. But they were his, and he’d cared for them for a long time, and… measured against what he’d lost, they were very small, quiet lives, worthless, really. “All right,” he said, at last, the words falling like dry leaves from his mouth. “They’re yours.”

Death inclined his head slightly, and held one bony hand palm up. A slight glimmer of green flashed above it, and then he put that hand into his robes, as if pocketing a coin. “IT IS DONE. IN RETURN, I WILL TELL YOU THIS. ALL THINGS MUST END. EVEN CREATURES LIKE YOU. AND YOU ALREADY KNOW THERE IS NO HEAVEN NOR HELL AWAITING YOUR KIND. BUT THERE ARE OTHER PLACES.”

Crowley heard his own breath escape in a hiss, but Death was not done speaking. 

“BUT THE ANGEL AZIRAPHALE DID NOT PASS INTO ANY PART OF MY KINGDOM.”

Crowley’s knees sagged, as if someone had slashed at their tendons. “I don’t… I don’t know what that means,” he said, trying to hold himself upright. 

“HE DID NOT DIE.”

“But he’s… he’s gone. He’s… completely gone. Well, except maybe he’s not because I think he’s…” he couldn’t even say it to the literal personification of Death, standing not six feet away from him. “He must have gone somewhere, please—”

The figure before him stepped back, and Crowley was dismayed to see he was fading into the darkness. “ALL THINGS WILL BE REVEALED IN TIME, CROWLEY,” he said, and then he was gone. 

Crowley didn't linger. He scuffed away the chalk sigils with his foot, then made his way slowly back outside the cemetery to the Bentley, arm still clutched to his chest. His shirt was sodden with blood now, and as soon as he sat in the driver’s seat he snapped the fingers on his left hand to heal the cut, but … it didn’t. He tried again, and again, but the blood still ran. 

Occult wound, he thought dimly, of course it wouldn’t heal just like that. That would have been too easy. 

Aziraphale wasn’t dead.

He snapped again and this time a bandage appeared, and he clumsily wrapped it around the wound. 

But he was still gone.

He drove back to his flat as the first light of dawn washed across the sky and the streetlights went off, one by one. The Bentley had the good sense, for once, to not torment him with The Best of Queen, or anything at all. In the dim grey light, the first workers made their way to shifts at hospitals and bakeries, yawning as they walked through the ordinary streets, and Crowley hated them hopelessly for being there, and being so unaware.

What awaited him in his flat was no surprise, but he lingered at his front door, took his time walking down the hallway, and stepped into the room slowly. Everything dry, and brown, and withered. And dead, completely dead. The pothos, the lilies, the orchids. The string of pearls. The snake plants and the venus flytraps. The bonsai juniper he’d had for a hundred and eighty years. 

He sat down next to a fiddle-leaf fig he’d always been particularly proud of and laid a hand on one of its desiccated leaves. Aziraphale wasn’t dead, but he wasn’t here either, and nothing made sense, and his arm hurt, and outside, dawn broke.

_Crowley. I’m sorry._


	4. A Mouthful of Stone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“I can help you. I’m good at finding lost things, you see. I find them all the time. Lost keys. Lost phones. Lost boys and girls out in the dark. I find them, and I bring them home, and I get them all warmed up. Sweet little morsels they are.” Her skin looked wrong, as if it was made of wax, just beginning to melt, and as she tilted her face towards him, Crowley knew what she was. They turned up, from time to time. Human born, but they made themselves into something else, something hungry and dark and empty. Some of them fed on blood, some of them fed on misery or joy or dreams. And in the old days, humans had hunted them down, killed them, and buried them with stones in their mouths. ___

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was written for the "vampire" prompt for Racketghost's 13 days of Halloween event and despite that, this is a gore-free chapter, promise! I will also note Crowley switches pronouns briefly about halfway through.

He stood at the end of Crowley’s bed. Crowley knew he was there, even though his eyes were closed, his face turned into the pillow. He’d been trying to sleep, trying to fill up a few of the hours in between thinking about what had happened last night and what he was going to do next. Whatever that was. He’d only had one idea, and he’d used that up.

By the time night fell he’d paced the length of his flat a thousand times, his hands were shaking and he felt thin and worn. His arm hurt, and blood stained the bandage. He’d opened a bottle of something he’d found in his kitchen but then recapped it and put the tumbler back in his cupboard.

He might have slept or he might have turned and turned in his sheets. For a while he’d just tried to lay still, stop himself from tossing about, stop his mind from going over and over what he’d learned. Until he’d felt him, standing there in the darkness at the end of his bed. He could _see_ him, the crease of a frown in between his eyes, hands smoothing the velvet nap of his waistcoat, over and over. In the dark he was terribly pale, almost translucent. 

Crowley imagined or he saw—or he imagined he saw—the angel lean over, slowly, reaching out a hand towards Crowley’s foot where it poked from under the blankets. Crowley held his breath, tried not to move, not sure if the contact would be wonderful or terrible, if Aziraphale’s fingers would pass right through him. Or would he feel the faintest gentle stroke against his ankle bone; would his fingers be warm or cold, so bloody cold—

_Crowley._

He opened his eyes, and of course _he_ wasn’t standing at the end of the bed. His room was dark and empty, grey-walled and silent.

“You’re terrible at haunting,” he said to the emptiness. “Can’t you… Give me a decent fucking clue? Write me a fucking note or something? Tap it out in morse code? Spell it out in scrabble tiles?”

Silence. Just more awful, aching silence.

When the sun came up he went back to the bookshop. He had nowhere else to go. The bookshop had been the centre of his own personal universe for two hundred and some years, and even now he was still circling it, even now that it was a mausoleum and not a home. 

When had he started thinking of the bookshop as home? 

No, that wasn’t right. The question was, when had he started thinking of _Aziraphale_ as home? He didn’t know, not exactly, he’d been like a frog that had been boiled alive, too stupid to leap from the pot even as the water grew hotter and hotter. It had been sometime after that night in Rome, after the oysters and the drinking, and they’d walked down to the forum together, and Aziraphale had been smiling at him and Crowley had felt, for the first time, not just infatuated but recognised.

 _No, stop that, you stupid git,_ he told himself; cut his thoughts off at the knees as he parked the Bentley in a taxi zone. He was driving himself mad. 

When he put his hand on the bookshop’s doorknob, he knew immediately that something was wrong. The door was unlocked, and not in the welcoming way it always was under his hands, but in a way that felt forced. The skin between his shoulder blades itched, and something scrabbled at the edges of his awareness.

He pushed open the door and stepped inside as the bell above him tinkled. 

A woman stood with her back to the door, gazing up at the titles on the shelves, and Crowley felt a wave of fierce protectiveness. What gave her the right to just walk in here and touch things? He stalked towards her, the anger bubbling up immediately. “Did the massive CLOSED sign not make it clear that this shop is, in fact, shut?” he snarled, and was about the launch into a further diatribe, but she turned towards him.

She was an ordinary looking woman, short and round, somewhere in late middle age (he wasn’t good with human ages, but she was no longer young). Her hair was brownish and cut in a shapeless bob, and she wore glasses, and a bright red Mickey Mouse t-shirt from Euro-Disney.

And then she smiled, and her teeth were stained and crooked and wrong somehow, and he abruptly stopped moving. 

“Hello,” she said, pleasantly. “Are you Mr Fell?”

“No,” he returned, not pleasantly at all. “I’m not, and you need to leave.”

She studied him for a moment. “I don’t think so,” she said, in a voice that sounded at once perfectly fine and also made him want to bare his teeth. “It’s been calling me for weeks. So much deliciousness here.”

“What are you going on about it?”

“This shop. It’s glowing with… regret, and loss, and grief.” She said the last in the way of a celebrity chef describing a five star meal. “And so are you! You’re just lit up like a Christmas tree, aren’t you?”

“What. Do. You. Want?” he said, taking what he thought was a menacing step towards her, and her smile widened just a little bit too far in response. 

“I can help you. I’m good at finding lost things, you see. I find them all the time. Lost keys. Lost phones. Lost boys and girls out in the dark. I find them, and I bring them home, and I get them all warmed up. Sweet little morsels they are.” Her skin looked wrong, as if it was made of wax, just beginning to melt, and as she tilted her face towards him, Crowley knew what she was. They turned up, from time to time. Human born, but they made themselves into something else, something hungry and dark and empty. Some of them fed on blood, some of them fed on misery or joy or dreams. 

And in the old days, humans had hunted them down, killed them, and buried them with stones in their mouths.

“I don’t think so,” he said, and he took his glass off, and he let himself shift a little bit, let some of the demon come out in his voice, let his scales ripple across his skin. 

“No need for that,” the woman said, mildly. “We are what we are.”

“And you can just fuck off,” he said, and she gave a little shrug.

“If you don’t want my help,” she said, and began moving towards the door. 

She was just about to open it when he gave in. “Wait. All right—I’ll bite. How can _you_ help me find what I’ve lost?”

She turned back. “I can tell you exactly where your lost thing is.”

The air in the shop felt close and heavy. She couldn’t hurt him, Crowley thought, not really. He was a big scary demon and she was just a pathetic little bottom feeder. A remora. But perhaps she could be useful. “Let me guess, you want to make a trade?”

Her eyes gleamed eagerly beneath her coke-bottle lenses. “Well of course. But I don’t want much. Just… a little memory, that’s all.”

“A memory?”

“Oh yes. Just something small. Think of your lost thing, think of something nice about it, that’s all. And I’ll just pluck it like a little flower.”

Almost as if she’d called it up, a memory rose in his mind. The Dowling estate, when Warlock had been… four, or five? One of those endless summer days with a small child that started too early and ended with an overtired tantrum. After bedtime Nanny had slipped outside, into the hush of the twilight garden, to sneak a quick cigarette where Harriet wouldn’t smell it. They’d said no miracles, of course they had, they’d been trying to raise the boy as neutrally as possible, so it meant doing everything the stupid human way. No miraculous ciggies, no snapping away the smell of it from his room.

She’d found her way into a quiet corner of the garden, where foxgloves and phlox and delphinium bloomed outrageously bright, and found Aziraphale—Brother Francis—pretending to garden. They’d stood in silence for a while as she smoked, and talked about nothing much, as a gardener and a nanny really would. _The boy was growing, wasn’t he? Like a weed. Bright as a button too. Oh yes, so much potential._

Francis had stepped closer at some point, while she’d been looking off into the distance trying not to think about Warlock’s worrying lack of reality-warping powers, and she’d felt his fingers on the back of her neck.

“Hold still my dear girl,” he’d said, West Country accent slipping back into Aziraphale’s normal tones. “You’re about to lose a pin.”

She’d stood as still as she could, as he’d fiddled with the bobby pin, pushing it back into place, and then for a moment his fingers had traced a pattern against the skin of her neck. “There, all better,” he’d said, and removed his hand far too soon. 

“Right,” she’d said, softly, imagined turning and kissing him even with those ridiculous teeth and awful sideburns, but he’d stepped out of reach, leaving her skin prickling in the evening breeze.

They’d touched so rarely over the years that she could recall each instance vividly, each memory a stained glass window in his mind. (And if she went back to her room and imagined his hands touching her everywhere else, touching her _here_ and _here_ and _here,_ well, she was still a demon, wasn’t she?)

“Oh that’s just wonderful, just delicious,” the vampire said in Aziraphale’s empty bookshop, and Crowley felt something sharp tugging in his mind and then… nothing. He tried to remember what he’d just been thinking of and—

“What the fuck did you do,” he started towards her, hissing. Something was gone, there was a hole where it had been, but he didn’t know what, and the edges were ragged and sharp.

Her eyes darted back and forth and for a moment she seemed almost frightened, then she was smiling again, placatingly this time. “Just a little treat, my dear. You’ve got so many mouth-watering memories, you don’t need them all, do you?”

He took another step, towering over her as much as he could. “Keep up your end of the bargain, then. Tell me where he is.”

She giggled, a high sound, almost childish. On her shirt, Mickey Mouse’s face twisted into a contorted snarl. “Oh it’s just so funny! Because he’s here. He’s here, and that’s the wrong question entirely, my sweet. Because there’s here and then there’s now, isn’t there? Here and now, here and after, here and there. And he’s definitely here, isn’t he?”

A sudden gust of wind blew outside and the door banged loudly. Crowley flinched, and the woman let out another high little laugh as the little bells above the door jangled unhappily.

And even through giggling, her eyes darted nervously, as though she was looking for something over Crowley’s head. “I told you he was here. But I don’t think he likes me very much. Don’t you worry, Mr Fell, I’m not trying anything on with your fellow. So I’ll be off then. Cheerio!” Then she moved, faster than he would have thought, with a strange sideways scuttle. The bell tinkled again, and she was outside in the bright sunlight and then lost in the usual Soho foot traffic.

Crowley could have chased her down, but instead put a hand to his head as if he could feel the brittle edges of what she’d taken. She’d been right about that, he had so many memories. What did one matter, even if she’d given him sweet fuck all in return. Just one bright stone of a memory, plucked from the shallows of a six thousand year old river. 

_But you liked that one._

“I think I did,” he replied, absently, stepping to the door and locking it. 

_I liked it too. I’ll keep it safe for both of us._


	5. The Rules of Balance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Because the universe had rules. Physics, and quantum weirdness, and the natural laws of animals and plants, and the rules of heaven (thou shalt not) and the rules of hell (or thou shalt regret it)._
> 
> _If there was an absence, things rushed to fill it. If there was a corpse, carrion-eaters rushed to claim it. Things balanced, and if they didn’t, the universe made them._
> 
> _And the biggest rule of all, was that nothing was given freely. The world had been saved, but Aziraphale had been taken in return._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you everyone who has left a comment on this so far! It means the world to me.  
> Chapter updates are going to shift to an every-second day schedule from now on, for life reasons.   
> And there are no content warnings for this beyond Crowley's continued general misery and the fact that I make him swear a lot.

He gave up pretending he wasn’t talking to Aziraphale. 

“Got to ward this place properly,” he said. “Just in case there’s more where that thing came from.” 

He told himself the silence was an approving one, and he walked around the bookshop carefully constructing occult fortifications for the doors and windows, barring the way to anything else that might try to force its way in. He’d been too dazed—and drunk—the past few weeks to think straight, to think beyond his own ruptured organs, to the fact that the bookshop was vulnerable. 

Principalities, he knew, were guardians, protectors, and this was Aziraphale’s realm, and the least Crowley could do was protect it in his absence. He could protect the books, and the scrolls, and the watercolours, and the sofa, and the Persian rugs, and the dust, and the heavy old furniture not even the charity shop would want. 

He knew these things deserved a better custodian than a possibly (certainly) alcoholic demon who’d lost the antichrist and his best friend in the space of a few days. (And his plants, but he wasn’t thinking about his plants.) They deserved better than a sub-par demon who’d summoned Death and managed to learn absolutely nothing, and who was apparently sending signals out to vampires that he was a psychic all-you-can-eat buffet. 

Aziraphale had deserved better too, he’d deserved Crowley to show up when he needed him, and Crowley had fucked that up too, so at least he could make sure the bookshop was safe.

“I’m a pisspoor excuse for a guardian,” he said, “but I’m the best you’ve got, so, you know. If it’s a problem for you, feel free to resurrect yourself at any time.”

Silence.

He circled around the shop once more, restlessly. “There has to be something else…” he muttered, looking up at the Oculus, at the washed-out sky above. “Christ, I need a drink.”

After rummaging around in the cupboards of the back room until he was forced to admit there was no more alcohol in the entire bookshop, unless Aziraphale had a secret stash upstairs in his private rooms. And h e probably did, indulgent bloody thing, but Crowley wasn’t ready to go up there, not yet, into rooms he’d never been welcome in before. So he stepped outside and locked the door behind him, instructing it firmly to open for no other hand but his own, on pain of being replaced with something cheap and shoddy from B&Q. 

“I’m just going to get booze, all right? Be back soon.”

The bookshop, and whatever was inside it, gave no sign of hearing.

Outside it was one of those dreary grey London days where it could have been any time from early morning to late evening. People moved around him as they always did, sensing whatever it was about him that made them shift away. He always made them uneasy—unless he was putting it on, trying to be tempting, or seductive—and that was how he liked it. But this time he was attracting stares too, and a gaggle of men on a corner stopped their talking to watch him go past, and then he heard them muttering. A mother with a small child trailing behind her picked the kid up and crossed the street away from him as he walked. The child began to wail. A little dog on a leash snarled at him, and then cowered behind its owner's feet. 

He caught sight of his reflection in a shop window and for a second it looked to him like he was a great dark thing but no, it was just a long black coat hanging in the shop, and he looked… normal. Those were his smeared features in the glass, his own half-sneering face looking back. 

Maybe he should manifest as some coiling mass of writhing snakes in the street, he thought. Or a vast black cloud of furious charred wings and teeth, and really give them something to be afraid of. 

He imagined what Aziraphale would say about that, his pursed-lip disapproval, and kept walking towards the off-license.

After he’d bought two bottles of Glenlivet from a shopkeeper who’d stared at him the whole time and didn’t say a word, he didn’t turn back towards the bookshop but on some nameless whim walked instead towards St James, through the park, and towards the familiar shape of a slatted bench. The man with an ice cream cart took one look at him and packed up and left, and the usual crowd of joggers and cyclists and recreational duck-feeders seemed thinner than usual.

He opened the bottle and took a swig from the neck.

“It’s you!” A voice said from behind him. He nearly choked on the whiskey but managed to swallow it down before turning on the bench. 

The woman behind him was familiar-looking, but then Crowley thought most humans looked like each other, so it took him a moment of staring at her to place her. Book girl, and more lately, airfield girl. Witch, or something. Dressed in some tartan thing that Aziraphale would probably have called charming. And she was stalking towards him, her face set into a frown.

“Hi?” He replied. 

She sat herself down on the park bench and twitched her skirt into place in the manner of someone readying themselves for a fight. “The runes told me to come here. I had no idea why, but here  _ you _ are, so I suppose that’s important somehow. How are you doing all this?”

He wasn’t sure what to say to that, so he didn’t say anything, and she continued to stare at him from behind her dark-rimmed glasses. “It must be you! I can feel it, it’s like a headache when I look at you! What are you doing?”

“At the moment, I’m trying to get drunk.” Crowley necked the bottle again. 

Book girl looked him over, again, this time more with frustration than anger. “I haven’t been able to do a spell properly since… well, that day. And all the auguries are nonsense, and when I tried to use my dowsing crystals they all just pointed to London. And then the runes gave me the coordinates for this park bench, so here I am, and you’re here too! It can’t be a coincidence.”

“Probably not,” Crowley agreed, and then held out the bottle towards her. “Whiskey?”

“It’s two o’clock in the afternoon, and it’s a Tuesday.”

“Always unhappy hour somewhere. Look, I don’t know about all your witchy stuff, but…” he trailed off, because he didn’t know how to finish the sentence.  _ Sorry I’m somehow ruining your soothsaying? Actually I don’t give a fuck. Can you bring back the dead? Or the-not dead? I’m a bit fuzzy on the details here. _

Instead he swallowed down another mouthful of Glenlivet. 

“Should you be drinking that so fast?” she said.

“Probably not, but I’m basically immortal.”

The witch stared at him some more. Abruptly, she held up one hand towards him, as if she was going to touch him, but not quite. “Your aura is… awful.”

“Thanks.”

“It wasn’t a compliment. You’re… a mess. A literal mess.”

He decided, then, that whatever this was, he’d had enough, so he stood up, but then she grabbed his arm. 

“Let me help you,” she said, urgently. “I can see that you’re hurting, and something terrible has happened, and I think I was supposed to come here. For you.”

He looked down at her small, human hand on his forearm, the delicate bones of it, so very human and breakable, frail and already decaying, even though she didn’t know that. They were all halfway in the grave, from their very first breaths. 

“And what would you like, in return,” he said, trying to sound amused, and not at all exhausted, not at all like  _ a literal mess, _ “for your  _ help?” _

“What?” She didn’t move her hand, but she looked at him in confusion. “What do you mean?”

“That’s how magic works, doesn’t it? Rules of the universe and all that. Balance. Trades. I’ve already given away my plants, and a memory. And…” He stopped then, because he couldn’t say the next words. That he’d given away Aziraphale too, somehow. 

Because the universe had rules. Physics, and quantum weirdness, and the natural laws of animals and plants, and the rules of heaven (thou shalt not) and the rules of hell (or thou shalt regret it). 

If there was an absence, things rushed to fill it. If there was a corpse, carrion-eaters rushed to claim it. Things balanced, and if they didn’t, the universe made them. 

And the biggest rule of all, was that nothing was given freely. The world had been saved, but Aziraphale had been taken in return. 

The witch was still gaping at him, then she shook her head. “No,” she said, almost fiercely. “No! I’m in your debt! We’re all in your debt. What you did that day. You saved everything.”

“No, the kid did that,” Crowley yanked his arm away now, “all I did was fuck everything up, every step of the way.”

_ Crowley. _

“And you can just shut up, all right?” He snapped at the empty air, and then turned back to the witch, but she was staring over his shoulder, eyes wide, mouth hanging ever-so-slightly ajar.

“I...” she said. “He was there, and then he just sort of… flickered away. Your friend from that night when you ran me over. With the hair and the waistcoat and the hands.”

Crowley sank back down onto the bench. “You saw him?”

She looked back at him now, nodding. “Just for a moment. Is he…” She didn’t have to finish the sentence. 

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t know. He’s not dead, I don’t think. But he’s gone. Except when he isn’t. And he’s not being very bloody useful about it.”

When Anathema—he grudgingly forced himself to pluck her name from the ether—spoke again, she said, very gently, “I’m so very sorry. Will you let me help you?”

He hadn’t been expecting that, and somehow the kindness in her voice was awful. His chest tightened, and the bone was lodged back in his throat. He opened his mouth to sneer something at her about the folly of a human offering demonic grief counseling, but nothing came out. 

He was desperate. He was sick with desperation, his heart was a useless desperate machine, his body was a thrumming jagged livewire of desperation, and he had to get Aziraphale back. 

_ Crowley. Trust her.  _

“Yeah,” he said, finally, and then added, pathetically, “please.” 


	6. Secret Histories

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Crowley could see Aziraphale in each outfit. Standing in a park in bright sunshine, or caught in ruddy firelight in a tavern, or hesitating over a spoonful of something, or walking towards him in a crowded marketplace. Back and back and back._
> 
> Crowley looks for something, and finds far more than he expects.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Why hello! I've missed you! This was written for the prompt "costumes" for Racketghost's 13 days of Halloween event. Why yes, it's mid-November, but Halloween is for always.
> 
> CW: minor injury, and Crowley is still going through a time.

“I’ll need something of his,” Anathema said, standing in  _ his _ bookshop, surrounded by  _ his _ books, and  _ his _ treasures, and  _ his _ angelic mementos and curios. There was nothing in the bookshop that Aziraphale hadn’t chosen, nothing he hadn’t touched, and known, and catalogued. He’d read every word in every book, and on every scroll, and every clay tablet.

There was nothing in this bookshop that wasn’t  _ his. _

Nothing but Crowley. He’d always been the thing in the bookshop Aziraphale hadn’t chosen, the interloper, the thing he hadn’t touched, the words he hadn’t wanted to read. 

The witch girl looked around with a slightly frowning air of disapproval at the shop’s idiosyncratic shelving system and its carefully cultivated air of shabbiness and dustiness. Let her disapprove, Crowley thought. Let her think she knew what the bookshop was: a mess, a shabby hoard, a firetrap. She didn’t know what it truly was. She didn’t know that was how Aziraphale had loved them.

He could have explained that they came and went so quickly. He could have shown her the watch on his wrist. The thing is, he could have said, you don’t last but your words, your creations, they do last. 

Instead, he gestured expansively around them. “This is all his.” 

She frowned, drifting towards a volume of something or others on the nearest shelf.

_ Don’t let her near the actual magical texts. Like that one! _

“Don’t get your knickers in a twist,” Crowley muttered. “She’s not here to steal your magic books.”

“Pardon?” Anathema turned with a copy of the Picatrix in her hands, and Crowley took it away from her and put it back on the shelf.

“Never mind.”

She nodded, and gazed about the shop once more, appraisingly this time. Crowley folded his arms and tried not to scowl at her, because she was trying to help. She had  _ offered _ to help, even after he’d explained, as well he could, what had happened. That Aziraphale was not dead, according to “occult sources”, and that he was also, somehow, here and not here.

“I can help you find him,” she’d said. “I’m good at finding things.”

Now, in the dim light through never-cleaned windows, watching her look around, it seemed ridiculous. How could she help him, how could some infant, some child, help an actual demon, and he considered telling her to bugger off, that he’d changed his mind. 

_ Crowley. _

But he didn’t.

“I’ll need something more… personal,” she said, finally, and Crowley scoffed a little at that, as if there was anything more personal to Aziraphale than his books, but she ignored him. “I don’t think a book has quite the right resonances. It needs to be something like a piece of jewellery or clothing. Worn against the skin, you know, so it could absorb his harmonic vibrations. Small would be better too, to concentrate the resonances.” She put a hand on a copy of Blake’s  _ The Book of Urizen  _ and Crowley resisted the urge to slap at her fingers.

“Harmonic vibrations,” Crowley repeated. “Right, sure, I’ll find something. You can… sit over there. And don’t touch anything.”

She tilted her head and gave him a careful look from beneath her round glasses. “May I look at the books?” 

“No,” he replied, bluntly. 

She seemed as if she was about to argue, but then her expression softened back into sympathy, and he stepped away from her before she could start trying to comfort him, or worse.

Something worn against his skin. He considered the drawers of the desk and the empty coat rack, opened a few boxes; found only assorted letterheads, a collection of regency calling cards and any number of elderly playbills for the Egyptian theatre. 

Anathema took a seat on the sofa and took out her phone and tapped away at it while he scavenged, fruitlessly, for a while longer. 

He had to go upstairs, and he didn’t want to. 

Even when Aziraphale had first opened the shop in 1800 and it still smelled of freshly-cut wood and the sign above the door gleamed with wet paint, the apartment above had been very obviously off-limits. He had offered Crowley a tour and proudly showed him every room on the ground floor; led him past every shelf, and then guided him up to the rows of bookcases around the mezzanine. And when Crowley had asked what was through the one door Aziraphale hadn’t opened, he’d been told it was his living quarters, and then steered him back downstairs to a goblet of wine. His private realm, and Crowley—for all his insinuating and suggesting and cajoling—knew there were some boundaries he should not test.

“I’ll find something, stay down there,” he finally said to Anathema. 

He set his reluctant feet on the steps, and then opened the forbidden door. On the other side lay a hallway, illuminated at one end by a window. The air eddied coldly against his face, colder than it had any right to be, really, even for London; even as summer drifted into autumn. The damp kind of cold that suggested water rising from the earth, leaky pipes, mould behind the plasterboard. As if the rooms themselves missed him too.

From the hallway a door opened first to an old fashioned black and white bathroom, and then a very small kitchen which Aziraphale clearly never used—books towered a foot high on a hob that would have been outdated by WW1. 

The last room was a bedroom. If Crowley had ever imagined Aziraphale’s bedroom (which he had, of course, Crowley was good at imagining things), it would have been like this: another Persian rug, a heavy mahogany four-poster bed swathed in a tartan bedspread, a small fortress of pillows. A nightstand stacked with books beneath an Art Deco lamp. A hulking mahogany wardrobe, and beside that, a chest of drawers of a similar solid style with a pitted and age-mottled mercury glass mirror, in which Crowley appeared as a drawn-faced blur. Another bloody angel-winged mug sat on the nightstand, as if left there just a moment ago. As Aziraphale had just been sitting on the bed, shoes off, reading and sipping his cocoa. Humming softly to himself in approval at whatever it was he’d been reading. Had he tried to sleep sometimes, had he laid in the bed in the dark and thought of Armageddon with sinking dread, or had he invited humans up here sometimes and let them touch him and touched them in return? 

_ Would you be jealous of the dead, Crowley? _

He opened the nearest wardrobe door, and it was stuffed full of clothes, in various pale shades. That finely knit cashmere cardigan he’d worn in the 1950s, the one with the shawl collar. Crowley had teased him about it, said he should take up smoking a pipe. Crowley only ever commented on his clothes to tease, because the other words had been impossible. (Wear that robin’s egg blue shirt again, it suits you. When did you stop wearing so much lace? I miss seeing the hollow of your throat above a tunic, the curve of your calf in stockings.)

He reached out and touched the cream sleeve of a coat that he’d last seen during the reign of one of the Georges. Fine wool, spotless, precise gold stitching at the neck. 

And behind that, another coat in an even more old fashioned style, and then a jacket, and then that doublet from the Globe, and then a pale cloak, and Crowley could see Aziraphale in each outfit. Standing in a park in bright sunshine, or caught in ruddy firelight in a tavern, or hesitating over a spoonful of something, or walking towards him in a crowded marketplace. Back and back and back.

The other side was more of the same, a geological strata in beige and cream and sand and buff and ivory, so he shut the wardrobe door again and went instead to the drawers. In the very top one he found rows of bow ties, of course, in pale blue and tartan. And then, beside that, a length of tartan fabric. The last time he’d seen that had been… 1967, after Aziraphale had given him the tartan thermos. He’d never worn it again, not that Crowley had seen, anyway.

That would do, then, and he pulled it out, gently. The silk felt cool and smooth and remote beneath his fingers, as though he was touching it from behind glass. 

Beneath it was a heavy but shallow wooden box, secured with an old fashioned brass lock, and Crowley put a hand on it without thinking. It was locked but he simply wished it to open, and the lid eagerly lifted under his hands.

At first he thought it was a box of trash—its contents certainly looked like nothing of value. Ticket stubs, and wine corks, a stained menu from a restaurant Crowley knew had been closed for a decade, and a small chapbook or something similar, which he set aside. The box’s inner dimensions didn’t quite match its outsides, he realised as he dug into it: it was far too deep, and contained too much material. 

Beneath the menu, his fingers closed on a tube of lipstick, which he pulled out. He recognised it as a purplish shade of MAC he’d favoured when he’d been living with the Dowlings as Nanny Ashtoreth. 

He laid the tube carefully on the top of the drawer, carefully not meeting his own eyes in the mirror. He should stop now, he knew, he was snooping now. But he couldn’t. He wanted to know what else Aziraphale had kept. 

Next were several cheap looking ribbons, in shades of gold and red. Chocolate box ribbons, he thought. Then he lifted out a few pieces of neatly-folded, yellowing newsprint. He opened one up and skimmed over the stories: rations, and the efforts on the front, and then, a small column about the destruction of St Dunstan’s Church. It was dated May 17, 1941.

More corks and ticket stubs and matchboxes. And then a pair of dark-tinted glasses; one lens cracked and the arm hanging askew. 

He remembered it vividly. 1814, the last time the Thames had frozen fully, and he and Aziraphale had gone to see the fair on the ice. Crowley had slipped over in full view of about a hundred people, and his glasses had fallen beneath someone’s bootheel and cracked and then kicked away in the crowd, and it had been easier to pull a new pair through the air then to find the old ones. But Aziraphale must have found them, and somehow, kept them.

He stopped digging, and instead opened the chapbook. Inside it read, in Aziraphale’s careful looping script: Catalogue Book Seven 1812. Beneath that the first entry was from January 18.  _ A playbill from a visit to Cheapside to see a dreadful staging of Faust. S will be travelling to the continent for the rest of the year. We had roasted chestnuts.  _

Crowley remembered that show, he remembered Aziraphale burning his fingers on the hot chestnuts. But S?

_ 1812, November 23. S has returned from Europe with a delightful bottle of Madeira and much news of Napoleon’s ineptitude in the peninsula.  _

S for Serpent. 

He leaned heavily against the drawer, a puppet with cut strings.

Aziraphale had collected the ephemera from their lunch dates and visits to the theatre. He’d saved wine corks and what Crowley now recognised as ribbons from chocolate boxes. He’d hoarded away scraps of paper, broken glasses, empty lipstick tubes. Crowley saw his own spiky handwriting on a calling card,  _ third rendezvous location, 7pm.  _

Aziraphale had saved trash, and made a catalogue of sorts, and stored it all in this box, and locked it away from the world. 

Crowley wondered, if he dug down far enough, if he’d find an oyster shell.

“Of course I would,” he said to the still air. Something swelled hot tight and hot in his chest, as though his bones and skin were barely keeping in a vast tide. “Of course you kept all these discarded things. But you were happy enough to discard me, when it suited you.”

The air around him seemed to thicken and cool even further at those words. 

_ No.  _

“No? You told me it was over. You told me I was being ridiculous. You  _ forgave _ me.” He couldn’t keep the venom from his voice at that. Forgiveness. Heavenly forgiveness. As if Crowley had ever wanted that. 

_ I was trying to keep us safe. _

“No,” Crowley hissed. His own face in the mirror was stretched in a snarl. “No, you were trying to keep yourself safe, trying to keep yourself in Heaven's good books. And look where that got you!”

_ I thought I could fix it, I thought if I just explained— _

“When has explaining ever worked with any of them? They don’t care about explanations! They’ve never cared. And now you’re gone, and you’ve left me alone!” He was yelling, he was yelling without realising it, slapping his hand on the drawer, dislodging the pile of scraps and detritus and rubbish, and the room felt like a held breath.

“You left me!” He yelled, again— 

_ No! _

The mirror in front of him splintered with a sudden, vicious crack, loud as a gunshot; and he flinched away as shards erupted around him. A line stung across his cheek beneath his glasses anyway, and the smaller shatters of glass falling to the floor. 

Then, more of that same awful listening silence from before. 

Crowley raised his hand to his face and his fingertips came away red with blood, and all the anger drained out of him as quickly as it had arrived. Blaming Aziraphale for being what he’d always been, for trying one last time to do what he thought was right, was like blaming broken glass for cutting.

“It wasn’t your fault,” he said, softly. “You still thought they could be reasoned with, even to the end. You still had faith. They didn’t deserve it, but you still had it.”

It was as near as he could get to _ I’m sorry. _

He healed his face with a gesture, and carefully repacked Aziraphale’s history of their lunches and chocolates and flowers and shows back into the wooden box. Then he shook the glass shards from the ascot, and took it downstairs to the witch.  



	7. O Cursed Spite

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Crowley,” the witch said, in a voice that wasn’t hers, a voice that pealed like church bells, a voice meant to turn men into prophets. “Crowley.”_
> 
> _Crowley blinked away the light spots in his vision, and said, cracked and desperate, the only thing he could say. “Angel?”_
> 
> Anathema tries to contact Aziraphale.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The prompt for this chapter was possession. I know the possession scene in canon is nothing like this but I like a bit of melodramatic nonsense. 
> 
> CW: Crowley’s still having a bad time. This fic should probably just be called: Crowley has a bad time, feat. the ghosts of Aziraphales past, present and future. There is a slight suggestion of self-harm and detailed description of a possession that neither party enjoy.

Crowley thought the witch might have left when he finally lurched back downstairs, but she was still there, sitting where he’d left her.

“This. He wore this,” he said in her direction, dropping the ascot onto the damask tablecloth of Aziraphale’s round table. 

“Next to the skin?” she asked.

“Yep,” he said, thinking of the pink of neon lights catching the edges of Aziraphale’s hair; the tartan thermos; the promise of a picnic that had never happened. Aziraphale had said he’d gone too fast, but it turned out he hadn’t been fast enough.

He dropped into a chair, an effigy made of bones held together by rags and longing.

_ This would all be so much easier if you’d just tell me what to do, instead of fucking around cracking mirrors and dropping books. _

The witch smoothed her hand over the ascot, and he held himself back from snatching it out of her hands, from snarling at her like a dog over a bone. Instead he touched the fingers of his good hand to the bandage on his other arm, and pressed briefly against the aching line in between his tendons just to feel the bright flare of pain. 

_ I wish you wouldn’t do that.  _

“Bugger off,” he muttered, under his breath, and the witch looked up at him from behind her round glasses. 

“Excuse me?”

“Doesn’t matter. Get on with it, will you?”

If Aziraphale were here, really here, he’d be making scoffing noises and telling Crowley off for being rude, and perhaps, somewhere, he was doing just that. Somewhere  _ undreamt of _ in Crowley’s philosophy. 

And perhaps Crowley could feel disapproval prickling between his shoulder blades, or perhaps he just desperately  _ wanted _ to feel it. In the hierarchy of Aziraphale’s attentions, irritation was still something; even if it wasn’t as heady and delicious as those rare moments when Aziraphale forgot himself and seemed to genuinely enjoy Crowley’s company. Or those even rarer moments, when he’d catch Aziraphale looking at him in another way entirely, feel an undercurrent flowing between them. A feeling Crowley had never trusted himself to name.

The witch regarded him calmly. “Let’s start, then.” She put her over-sized handbag on the table and withdrew a candle, a lighter, a crystal wrapped in tissue paper, and what looked like a bunch of sage tied up with string. 

“Really?” Crowley said, sneering. “Bit of a cliche?”

“You know as well as I do that’s all window dressing. But it helps me focus.”

With that, she lit the candle and put it beside the ascot, and then she shut her eyes.

For a moment Crowley thought she might start chanting in Latin, because it was always bloody Latin, never Akkadian or Olmec or Etruscan. But she simply sat, and smoothed the tartan fabric with her slender hands.

Crowley sat back in his chair and crossed his arms. He could, if he concentrated, see her aura; a rippling sparking mass like a bioluminescent jellyfish, furling and unfurling in time with her breathing.

Her eyes still shut, the witch moved her fingers in gentle circles on the silk of the ascot, and Crowley watched and knew it was pointless. Utterly pointless. And yet a little bit of hope was a dangerous thing, and his wayward, useless heart juddered faster in his chest with it. 

When she spoke, eventually, she lifted her chin skywards. “Aziraphale, I’m calling to you. Crowley says you’re here. But he can’t find you.” 

The candle flame leapt on the wick. Nothing else moved.

“Aziraphale, he needs your help. Can you send us a sign, or a message?”

Crowley heard only the ticking of his wristwatch, obnoxiously loud, and Anathema’s steady breathing as she held herself still, expectant. A few moments passed and then she opened her eyes.

“Hands,” she said, decisively. “I’ll need to use some of your power.” 

“Didn’t take you for the sort to meddle with the forces of darkness.”

“I’m absolutely not, but I think it could work.”

He pulled his sunglasses off and laid them on the table beside her little faux occult tableau, and their eyes met. Hers brown, his yellow from corner-to-corner. 

“I don’t know if you’re going to like that very much,” he said. 

“I know you’re a demon… Mr Crowley,” she said, steadily, and a small, grudging part of him might have been a little impressed with how calm she was. “And I know you’re very old, and very powerful, and you  _ freak me out. _ But you also helped save the world, and I would very much like to help you find your friend. I can feel him, here, but I can’t reach him. So please, give me your hands.”

She meant it. She was sincere, and she was looking into his eyes without fear, and she meant it. So he left his glasses on the table, and reached out and took her fine-boned fingers in his. He made humans nervous, especially the sensitive ones, but if she wanted to flinch away when their hands touched she hid it well. 

“Let’s try this again,” she said, after a moment, her voice only a little strained. “If you focus on Aziraphale’s presence, and I tap into some of your power, we might get somewhere.”

Nonsense, he thought, utter nonsense. But he tried.

Damn him, he  _ tried.  _

He imagined the angel, as if he was just standing over there, out of sight, doing whatever he did all day—drifting between the shelves, lightly touching the spines of old volumes, taking a book down when it suited him. Idly smoothing over the velvet of his waistcoat. Light glowing in his pale curls. Humming something that hadn’t been popular in decades, or centuries, something by Noel Coward at the absolute latest. Although he’d once caught him listening to Simon and Garfunkel some time in the 1970s, because it had been an act, that old-fashioned nonsense, he was the cleverest person Crowley had ever known, how had he let this  _ happen— _

He felt it at the same time as Anathema made a surprised sound: pressure, a gust of wind through the shop that couldn’t be there and that made the scrolls shiver and the papers on the desk lift and the candle flame flicker, and a sudden sharp smell like the air before a storm, what did they call that, petrichor—

Then the room flooded, for a moment, with a blinding light and a roaring sound, as if the shop had been hit by lightning. He almost tried to duck away, pull his hands from Anathema’s but her grip was implacable as the noise boomed around them, tornado wild, as the light flared to the point of pain. 

Anathema tugged on his hands, and somehow she was yanking him to standing, but he could barely see her beyond a blur as the light grew and grew. 

Then fast as they had come, the light and the noise were gone. 

No, the light wasn’t gone. 

It was in the witch.

She stood before him, her small hands still gripping his painfully tightly. And she was glowing. Her eyes were the colour of the sky, and shone with light, and her skin seemed lit from within too. Behind her cruved the glowing arcs of two outstretched wings.

“Crowley,” the witch said, in a voice that wasn’t hers, a voice that pealed like church bells, a voice meant to turn men into prophets.  _ “Crowley.” _

Crowley blinked away the light spots in his vision, and said, cracked and desperate, the only thing he  _ could _ say. “Angel?”

Aziaphale-in-Anathema opened his mouth, and even the inside of her throat was lit up; the light shone through her teeth. “The time is out of joint, Crowley,” he said, in that echoing, layered voice, Aziraphale’s voice but from a thousand mouths. 

“What? Where are you? I’ll come to you. Heaven, Hell, Earth, wherever you are I’ll come to you,” Crowley babbled, desperate. Anathema’s hands in his were warm, too warm, and the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck stood up with the power within her. 

“I tried to make it all stop,” Aziraphale said. “I tried to make it stop, but now everything is happening all at once!”

“Angel please, please just explain and I’ll, I’ll help you, I’ll find you—”

“The time is out of joint!” Aziraphale boomed again.

“I don’t know what that means!” Crowley yelled back. The wind in the store was rising again, the pressure, the sense of 

“O cursed spite!” Aziraphale rang, and his voice was so loud Crowley flinched. “Crowley! I opened a door and I stepped through, and I stepped through all the doors, and now everything is all at once, and I can’t get back to you—”

“Tell me how, and I’ll find you!”

“I gave everything away—” 

Crowley could see sweat beading at the witch’s hairline, and a clench in her jaw, and her hands gripped his so tight if he was a human she might have broken his bones.

“Aziraphale, you’re hurting the girl, I don’t think she can take it. Just tell me what to do?”

Aziraphale shook the witch’s head, and behind her body his great, not-quite-real luminescent wings flexed. “I was always afraid we would run out of time, because it’s always been about time, hasn’t it? And the clocks are all wound up now, again, and everything is still going, but I can’t. The time is out of joint.”

“You keep saying that!” Heat welled behind Crowley’s eyes, and he clenched his jaw, willed it away. “Angel. I’m begging you. Where did you go?” 

“I’m here, I’m here. I’m always here. I’ve been here since the beginning,” Aziraphale said, and shut Anathema’s eyes, but the glow shone through the tracery of her eyelids. Crowley realised he could see the shape of her bones radiating through her skin. “I can’t… I can’t hold it, I’m sorry, Crowley—”

And then Aziraphale-in-Anathema yanked Crowley’s fingers up and pressed them to the witch’s mouth, with a brief stinging kiss like acid burning into his skin. He opened his mouth to beg him, again, to just say something useful, but Anathema’s body jolted and the light flared out of her, supernova bright. The tearing sound like the depths of a hurricane came again, building and building and building, and everything went utterly black just for one brief second of absolute darkness and absence, and Crowley knew he was gone. 

Anathema’s hands went limp in Crowley’s, and she dropped onto the rug. 


	8. If It Be Now

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _He remembered the dove, crushed in the pocket of Aziraphale’s black magician jacket. Only a few weeks ago, although it felt like a vast expanse of time had passed since that day. Crowley had sparked life back into the dove with his hands and his powers, and it had flown off into the summer sky. He’d thought, for a moment, how foolish it had been to save a single bird when the world was ending. But he hadn’t done it just for the bird._
> 
> Crowley finally realises something about Aziraphale's disappearance and how to reach him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Crowley resuscitates the dove in the book, not the show, so let’s go with book canon here. 
> 
> This was for the ouija prompt for Racketghost's 13 days of Halloween event and I decided out of sheer desperation to make it about the function of the ouija board—to deliver messages from elsewhere—rather than the literal object. 
> 
> Writing this has taken far more time than I anticipated, so thank you to everyone who has stuck with me so far, and your comments have given me life.
> 
> CW: Crowley is exceptionally callous in this chapter, and Anathema is hurt quite badly BUT everyone makes it out ok.

The witch shuddered on the rug, her back arching, her breaths agonised and jagged. In the absence of Aziraphale’s celestial light she looked small and young, and so very human. 

Crowley knew she was dying; Aziraphale’s power had done something to her, scoured through her in a way no human body could withstand. And he stood, watching, as she gasped for breath and slowly and painfully died.

What had he expected? That some human witch could say a few words and wave a wand and Aziraphale would appear, like a rabbit from a hat?

He had, because he was a fool. He’d hoped desperately and stupidly, and he’d tried, and it hadn’t worked. 

He stared down at her, and she heaved helplessly and clutched at her own chest. And?  _ And?  _ She was dying. So bloody what. He’d seen humans die in unfathomable numbers. They all died. Everything came and went. Empires rose and fell. Trees grew from saplings into majestic towering old growth and then collapsed, and new trees grew from their rotten bodies. The numberless children of the earth breathed and fucked and died, and what did one of them matter at all?

There’d been few certainties across the six thousand years of his life, but one of them was that humans came and went, and the only thing that stayed constant had been Aziraphale. Except Aziraphale was gone too in a shockingly human way, and Crowley was alone. All that remained was this stupid bookshop, and Crowley orbiting the empty space where Aziraphale should be.

The witch choked at his feet. 

_ Crowley. Help her. _

He remembered the dove, crushed in the pocket of Aziraphale’s black magician jacket. Only a few weeks ago, although it felt like a vast expanse of time had passed since that day. Crowley had sparked life back into the dove with his hands and his powers, and it had flown off into the summer sky. He’d thought, for a moment, how foolish it had been to save a single bird when the world was ending. But he hadn’t done it just for the bird.

And here was another little dove, one who had unwittingly flown into a hurricane.

He dropped to his knees beside the witch. With a touch of his hand to her shoulder he stilled her convulsion; a healing miracle tossed like water on the embers of a stuttering fire. He told her body it wasn’t burning, told her mind that it wasn’t a mass of fried synapses, and her terrified fast-beating heart that it could slow. She still sparked with remnants of angel fire and he blanketed it with his darkness—cancelling each other out, the way they’d always done—and she finally gulped air again and again. He took that as a good sign. Or at least a sign he didn’t need to call an ambulance or whatever it was damaged humans needed. 

After a few more deep breaths, her eyes fluttered open. “Oh god,” she rasped.

“Nope,” Crowley replied, grimly. “Just me.” 

He reached out a hand to help her sit up but she flinched away, and he supposed he didn’t blame her for that. So he stood, backed away, wiping his hands on his jeans. He’d had whiskey, hadn’t he? He should find it. Offer her some. Seemed like the thing to do. Perhaps he could even apologise.  _ Sorry I almost let you die and all that, little dove. No hard feelings? _

He found the whiskey near the till, and went back to the witch. She’d managed to sit up, and she was shakily pulling her hair back from her face.

He opened the bottle and held it towards her, and she considered it for much longer than he thought was reasonable.

“You won’t catch demon germs, I promise,” he said, and she blinked at him. Finally she  took the bottle from his hand, and drank deeply. After another swig, she passed it back, and he gulped down another mouthful. 

He could… He could ask her to try again. Because perhaps if she tried again Aziraphale could come back, and then he could... stay. Take up permanent residence. 

(And then what? Her body would burn up in hours. Or if by some miracle it didn’t, Aziraphale would be functionally mortal, housed not in an angelic corporation but fragile human flesh and t he thousand natural shocks of mortality.  Not to mention what would happen to the girl. Not that Crowley cared, not really, but Aziraphale wouldn’t want to hurt her. If Aziraphale were here—really here, not just some shattered reflection—he’d be horrified by the very idea.)

It didn’t matter. She wouldn’t try again after whatever the hell had happened, after Aziraphale had burned through her, and it was a stupid idea anyway. Every single thing Crowley had tried had been unbearably stupid.

He felt old and tired, and so very alone. 

“How long was it?” she croaked. 

The heavy black rectangle of his watch on his wrist somehow still ticked on. There was something obscene about the fact that it still worked, even though the world had broken open when he’d staggered into the burning bookshop and discovered Aziraphale gone. It should have stopped. He glanced at it anyway. “Five minutes, maybe.”

She made a disbelieving noise, and her eyes unfocused, as if she was staring into a distance he couldn’t see. “It felt like… aeons passing. Is it always like that?”

“Being possessed? Dunno, usually been the possessor, not the possessee.”

A pause, and she looked at him with that sharp intelligence. Too clever for her own good, really, this little dove. “I really don’t want to know.” 

“You _knew_ what I was when you came here,” Crowley replied, snatching back the whiskey. He desperately wanted to be alone now so he could drink until he passed out again. “You were the one who offered to help me. And… it didn’t work. So you can piss off.”

She sat up straighter. “What do you mean it didn’t work?”

“He possessed you, quoted bloody Hamlet, and you nearly died, and it meant nothing. It was a complete failure. There may be providence in the fall of a sparrow, but he defies augury.” 

She frowned again, and then she took the whiskey from his hand and set it on the floor. “No,” she said, “No. I know where he is.”

_ I’m here. _

He stopped himself from grabbing her shoulders and shaking her. But he still hissed, bared his teeth. “Were you going to tell me, or were you just going to sit there drinking my whiskey—”  


“Yes, damn you,” she replied, her voice rising to meet his. “I’m not holding out on you! I just needed a minute to get over the whole almost dying thing.”

“You’re fine now! Just get on with it!”

“All right all right! I’m telling you! When he… possessed me, I saw this bookshop. But it contained … well. A lot of places, actually. There were doors everywhere, and every door opened somewhere else. I only got glimpses of most of them… But at the end of the hallway the door was wide open and I saw  _ the _ garden. And he was there in _ the garden.” _

“Garden,” Crowley said, stupidly, his mind turning to St James and its neat lawns and the ducks and willow trees easing into the lake, the city humming beyond them, the empty bench. And then before that, the rose garden at the Dowling Estate, where angel-blessed blooms weighed branches almost to the ground. Or before that, an orchard in New England, and before that, the cool waters of the fountains of the Alhambra. A market garden behind an abbey in Ireland. An olive grove in Rome. The hanging gardens of Babylon, which had actually been in Nineveh. There had been so many gardens, he forgot which was which. Where had the scent of orange blossoms hung in the air, where had carefully raked stones mimicked the clouds above, where had they walked together under the shade of jacaranda trees in full purple blossom. He’d never paid enough attention to the scenery, he’d always been memorising Aziraphale instead. 

_ “The garden,” _ Anathema repeated, speaking slowly as if to a child. “The Garden of Eden. It was this amazing, lush place, and there was a huge stone wall around it, and he was there, under a tree. He is there. I saw it.”

Crowley stared at her and she stared back, and then he laughed, a dry wheeze that cracked out of him completely unbidden.

“The Garden of Eden?” 

“Yes. Why is this so funny?”

“Because,” Crowley forced out from the rictus of his grinning mouth, “because the bloody place has been nothing but a dusty hole in the desert for five and a half thousand years.” The laughter evaporated as quickly as it had come, leaving him as dry and parched as he’d been before. “I don’t know what you think you saw, but it wasn’t the Garden of bloody Eden. Went back there in the Roman days once for a look-see and there wasn’t even a stone left of the wall. She wanted it gone, so it was.”

“But… I saw it. I know I saw it. I know what it was—” the witch argued, but Crowley shook his head. 

“The only way he could be in the garden,” he said, “is if he could go back in time.”

He stopped talking, the words suddenly knotting in this throat, and his heart seemed to stop and spasm too.

_ The time is out of joint, o cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right. _

Anathema kept speaking but he wasn’t listening. 

_ Here and now.  _

He didn’t know what Aziraphale had done, or how, but he knew, suddenly, completely, that it wasn’t about how, but when.  _ The time is out of joint. _

He stood, and extended the limits of his power, unfurled his senses into the rush and roll of the world. 

Time flowed around everything, a relentless flood carrying him inexorably on and on, taking him further and further away from Aziraphale. But if Aziraphale had somehow figured out how to stop the waters, or cross them, then _he_ could too. 

_ Crowley.  _

_ I’m coming.  I didn’t understand, but I think I do now. You did something with time, didn’t you, clever angel? _

_ If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. _

_ The readiness is all? Then I’m ready. _

He gathered up his power, snapped his fingers, and stopped time. 


	9. Burnt Offerings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Even in this suspended moment his pulse throbbed in the wound in his arm, whiskey burned sour in his stomach, fear curdled in his throat. And stupid stupid hope still sent sparks through his nerves, stuttered through his veins. This was it. He had to try again._
> 
> A sacrifice, and an open door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for the "bonfire" prompt, and a CW for car immolation.
> 
> Stay safe out there, lovely ones.

The air was still, a bell caught between reverberations. Even the light itself felt liquid and thick, and if Crowley wanted to he’d have been able to see photons suspended in the air. Not that he had time for that; he couldn’t hold a frozen moment forever. Even now he felt the push of time gathering around him, a pressure that would build and build until he buckled, and the world would restart its endless whirl. He didn’t have  _ time _ .

He ignored the witch, one hand extended mid-gesture, and looked around for something, some sign or signal. Like what, exactly, he sneered at himself? What did he hope to find? A glowing neon arrow? A brass and steam time machine? A white rabbit leaping into a hole, and an angel at the bottom worried about being late for an important date?

No, something that didn’t belong. Something  _ out of joint.  _

He shut his eyes, reaching out with the jagged darkness of his true self. Touch and not-touch. Felt the familiar edges of the bookshop; the places patched by miracles; the extensions created by angelic will butting up against the human-made walls. 

And yes, _there,_ right below the oculus… a tear. A fissure. A gap where reality had been cracked, the edges left jagged and frayed. And behind the tear, something even his occult senses couldn’t quite describe. Some vastness, bright and deep and endless. A glimpse behind the stage. 

He concentrated on the gap, reached for it, and found he could just about slip his fingers into the crack. He grasped the edges with his hands and his not-hands, and then he pulled—

The gap was the tiniest of spaces between boulders made of jagged glass, with all the weight of causality and temporality and gravity and other universal constants pressing against them, and his fingers scrabbled and he couldn’t make it move— 

He staggered forward, through the tear but not  _ through _ it.

Even in this suspended moment his pulse throbbed in the wound in his arm, whiskey burned sour in his stomach, fear curdled in his throat. And stupid stupid  _ hope _ still sent sparks through his nerves, stuttered through his veins. This was it. He had to try again.    


_ Crowley. _

He found the contours of the tear once more. And then he channelled all his power, and threw everything he had against the edges. For a moment, he felt the edges shift and give the tiniest amount—but time snapped back around him and he staggered again. 

This time the human sounds of the Soho rushed in and he heard Anathema speaking, “I couldn’t be more sure if there was a sign above the place saying The Garden—”

He snapped his fingers.

He’d frozen time in the bookshop before—not often, and not for long, and always guiltily. Just when the light fell in a very particular way through the dusty windows and caught in Aziraphale’s hair, or when he’d come back after years between visits, and Aziraphale had turned that glowing smile in his direction. Or when Aziraphale had been distracted by a customer and been particularly frosty and snide to a customer, and then turned back to Crowley with that expression of horrified disdain. As though he and Crowley were unified front against some miscreant trying to buy a first edition of  _ The Wasteland. _

He’d always felt greedy and tawdry, after, and he’d vow to never do it again. 

Eventually, though, they would be at some little cafe, halfway through a bottle of Chateau Petrus and Aziraphale would have a forkful of tagliatelle and an expression of rapture on his face. And Crowley wouldn’t be able to help himself. He’d slip his hand beneath the table and snap his fingers. Steal the moment, enjoy the sick thrill of holding those fleeting glimpses of a world where they weren’t hereditary enemies, where they weren’t fraternising, where they could just  _ be.  _

_ Try again. _

He heaved a breath in the unmoving air. This place beyond places always felt like impaling the world on a pin and encasing it in glass, in complete silence—his body was the only thing that made a sound, his unnecessary heart and his blood and his breath, his feet scuffing on the parquet floor. 

_ Crowley. _

He had to try again, he had to force the gap open.

_ Crowley.  _

He drew his power up, and lifted his hands.

The shop bell dinged, a bright glassy sound in the heavy air. 

Crowley turned. The door stood open, where it had been firmly shut and locked before—he’d locked it himself when he’d come back with the witch girl. Outside, London and the world, all completely still. 

Something pale flashed by the window, just at the edge of his sight. 

He stumbled to the door and out, and onto the street. It had been sometime in the afternoon, perhaps, and there were countless bodies on the street, humans coming and going. But their faces were smeared and wrong looking, as if they were photographs exposed for too long. In the sky above, a bird: not a sparrow caught mid-fall but the dark shadow of a crow, poised in between the bloodrush of heartbeats and breaths.

That pale fluttering again, the edge of a camel-hair coat flicking around a corner, and Crowley staggered towards it for a few stops, but then he stopped.

It should have been utterly silent in the street, just as he should have been utterly alone. But a low, unmistakable growling sound, one he knew as well as any, rose up through the air. 

He’d left the Bentley parked outside the bookshop… this morning? Yesterday? Weeks ago? In another life? He didn’t even know when it had been, but it was there, a sheaf of parking tickets stuffed under one windscreen wiper. Black and gleaming, each atom rebuilt perfectly by an eleven year old when the world hadn’t ended. And it sat in the frozen moment, engine running. 

He stepped towards the car, reached out a hand to touch the cool metal roof. It seemed to shiver slightly under his hand with the thrum of the internal combustion engine; the spark and the pistons reading to fire. 

“Good girl,” he said, softly. 

_ Crowley. Doubt thou the stars are fire?  _

“Fusion, technically,” he replied to the empty air. “Not really fire. Hydrogen atoms fuse together in a completely different process to chemical combustion on Earth. You need oxygen for things to burn. Basic rules of physics, right?”

Rules. There were rules, rules to everything, rules of physics, rules to how long he could hold time, rules for the balance of the universe, rules for sacrifices, rules for things given and taken away. 

What had he given away already? Some blood, his plants, a memory. Tearing back time would call for more than that.

The Bentley thrummed. 

Inside, music began playing. It sounded tinny and far away.  _ You will remember, when this is blown over, and everything's all by the way... _

“Stop it, you sentimental old thing, you’re making it even harder,” he hissed, but the car ignored him, as it always did. 

He spent one last moment admiring the cool smoothness of the Bentley’s black roof, its elegant curves and shining chrome. It was beautiful, and he’d loved it from the moment he saw it. 

He stood back and let loose a torrent of hellfire.

The car ignited sickening easily, and this time Crowley wasn’t trying to hold it together. He watched as the flames raced along its length, the paint bubbling as the fire caressed away the glossy shine. The interior went up almost immediately, all that leather and the wool carpeted floor; the wooden details of the dashboard falling to the hungry hellfire.

He hadn’t put petrol in it for decades but the fire licked out the tank anyway and roared all the brighter. Glass cracked and popped. There was nothing so dramatic as an explosion, just the unstoppable appetite of the fire. 

The humans in the street seemed to be watching with their twisted, immobile faces. Time pressed its flanks against him, and he held it as fast as he could as the car burned and the greasy black smoke stained the too-still air. His eyes watered from the acrid stench of burning paint and melting rubber. Without wind the smoke curled straight up into the pale sky, obscuring the black shadow of the crow.

Freddy sang on.  _ Bring it back, bring it back. Don't take it away from me.  _

“Ridiculous, soppy thing,” he whispered.

_ You or the car? _

“It’s just a car.” 

He didn’t feel anything different, didn’t feel any rush of power, didn’t feel the universe tilt. But behind him, the shop door dinged.

The door stood open again, as it had when he’d walked out. But now it no longer opened into the familiar cluttered chaos of the bookshop. Instead, Crowley could see white dunes stretching out towards high stone walls. 

He stepped through the door, and onto the sand.


	10. Slouching Towards Eden To Be Born

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Aziraphale,” he creaked, and the fish-hook in his chest twisted like a knife. “Can’t believe you’re having a picnic without me.”_
> 
> Crowley finds an angel under an apple tree.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello hello my god what a week I hope you are all having a cup of tea and a nice lie down. I just want to thank everyone who has left a comment, I am APPALLING at responding to comments and it is a deep personal flaw of mine, but I love and cherish every one.
> 
> This chapter is for the prompt "haunt", if you've read this far you know the deal, Halloween 4eva. No CWs! (Unless you're bothered by overwrought prose, awkwardly shoehorned Yeats quotes, and smooching.)

Ahead, the garden, its walls vast and white beneath gathering storm clouds. He’d gone barefoot the last time he crossed this desert, the scaled soles of his feet thick and tough, so he hadn’t felt the burning sun or the rough stones or the scrape of thorns as he’d walked away from Eden. Now his boots sank into the sand and something caught in his chest: a sharp tug on a line, a hook caught through his sternum, a sensation he’d only noticed in its awful absence.  _ Aziraphale. Aziraphale. _

He was here. 

He glanced back to see the bookshop’s familiar doorframe sitting on the sand, skeletal against the sky, only blackness beyond. As he watched it blurred and shifted, until it was nothing but a pile of sand. 

No going back that way. And he didn’t care.  _ He _ was here. 

He started across the dunes, the hook in his chest pulling him across the sliding sand, straight to the base of Garden’s blankly merciless limestone walls. There had been no way in or out of Her garden—until Aziraphale had blasted a hole in the wall—because who would want to leave perfection to starve and shiver in the wasteland? No need for a gate, until Crowley had slithered in and fucked it all up.

The first time he’d come here he’d crawled on his belly, the roughest of beasts, but this time he opened his wings and flew up the wall in half-a-dozen easy wingbeats. 

And there, a few hundred metres down the parapet, Aziraphale. Dressed in white robes and staring across the desert.

Crowley’s heart stopped, and he opened his mouth to call out but the tug in his chest pulled away, down into the garden, away from the angel looking out over the sand. 

As he watched, a dark line flowed like water up the edge of the wall, sinuous and rippling. It coiled up behind Aziraphale on the wall, long tongue flickering out from its dark, blunt head and tasting the air at Aziraphale’s ankles. 

Crowley knew himself, of course. Could feel a sympathetic stretching and pulling as this younger version of him flowed into human form and stepped up to the angel. He was dressed in some sort of tatty black sack, a wide-eyed innocence to his face that Crowley found almost excruciatingly awful to look at. He was so naive, even after his literal baptism by fire in hell. 

The Serpent of Eden, the six thousand year ago Crowley, turned to Aziraphale and spoke.

Crowley wasn’t close enough to hear what he was saying but he remembered well enough.  _ That went down like a lead balloon. _

Aziraphale twisted those beautiful, broad hands together—made to wield a sword, but so much better suited to the fussy, painstaking work of calligraphy or book restoration or a thousand other quiet, delicate tasks. Then-Crowley’s eyes flicked up and down the angel’s form, in a so-very-interested way that made Crowley himself wince. He couldn’t have been more obvious if he’d… no, he couldn’t have been more obvious, with his ridiculous hair and those stupid curls, his absolute certainty that Aziraphale wouldn’t smite him on the spot, his… flirting. Horrible flirting but still flirting.  _ Flamed like anything.  _ Then-Crowley laughed, incredulous but also wide and easy, shifting himself towards Aziraphale, before thunder broke through the air. 

And then. Fuck. Fucking fuck. Crowley knew what was coming but he still wasn’t prepared to witness it. 

The moment when Aziraphale lifted his wing over his younger self and the two of them shuffled closer, Aziraphale’s feathers almost but not quite touching Crowley’s own wing. Crowley could still remember glancing sidelong at Aziraphale as the fat raindrops began to fall, wondering  _ what the fuck was happening.  _ Afterwards, alone in the desert, turning the moment over and over again in his mind like a river-polished stone, he would realise it was a kindness, driven by the same impulses that made the angel give away his sword. 

The angel and the demon on the wall shimmered… and Aziraphale stood fretful and alone once more, until a massive glossy serpent slithered up behind him again.

He wasn’t watching the past play out before him, but something like a memory. A loop.

The scene replayed and Crowley watched his young self tilt his head and smile, and Aziraphale fret and stammer, until that final moment where he lifted his wing and they moved closer. This time he couldn’t take his eyes from Aziraphale’s face, his nervous little breaths as his own younger self’s sarcasm fell utterly flat. They’d both learned to hide themselves much more as the years went on, although Aziraphale had somehow never lost his capacity for wounded naivety. 

And though neither of them had aged a day, they both looked so  _ young.  _

The scene began again, and Crowley watched it play out once more. But when it began for a fourth time, he shook his head, forced himself away. He stood up on the parapet before spreading his wings again and dropping into the lush greenery below. 

The garden was like nothing he’d seen since. A path led through the garden’s riotous flowers and sweet-scented groves, a cacophony of scents all layered over each other in a way that should have been overwhelming. Dragonflies the size of small birds whipped through the trees, butterflies with handspan-wide wings fluttered from one oversized bloom to the next. The trees grew almost obscenely verdant and lush. A land free from decay, from mortality, from loss and grief. (Or it had been, until Crowley had hissed temptations into Eve’s ear.)

Birdsong echoed. Thunder rumbled, distantly. This too, Crowley realised, was a loop, the whole thing resetting every few moments. The sun never dropped any further behind the clouds, the light never dimmed, the rain never descended.

How had Aziraphale done this?

He broke into a clearing and stopped for a moment to catch his breath—he shouldn’t need to rest, but his body insisted. But through the trees he saw something that wasn’t a tree or a bird or an enormous jewelled insect. Something that shouldn’t be in this garden. 

He moved closer. A room, set into the trees. Like a stage lifted and plunked into the forest. 

A Roman popina, and another younger version of himself, drinking alone. This time, it took him a moment to place the moment. His hair short and curled, a laurel wreath around his head. He seemed almost like an entirely different person from the Crowley on the wall. As he drank, Aziraphale approached him, smiling brilliantly. 

_ Still a demon then. _

And Crowley, fresh from some horrific thing he’d seen in Caligula’s court, his mouth still stinging with the foul aftertaste of some overblown missive to hell about his wicked deeds, all sharp edge and scowl, sneered. Even in Rome, Crowley shouldn’t have been hard to shock, not after four thousand years on earth, but humanity had a capacity for sadism the denizens of hell had envied but never matched. That imagination of theirs. 

He remembered that day, that feeling of seeing Aziraphale, his irritation at the intrusion when he’d just wanted to drink alone until the memories of Caligula’s nonsense, and Crowley’s own part in it, had sufficiently blurred. But Aziraphale had wanted his company. No one ever wanted a demon’s company, not even other demons.

_ I’ve never eaten an oyster. _

_ Let me tempt you! _

They’d drained a whole amphora, Aziraphale’s neck bobbing as he swallowed, the honey-sweet mulsum thick on Crowley’s tongue. Aziraphale had been so drunk he had draped an arm over Crowley’s shoulders and leaned against him as they’d walked out of the restaurant. The sun had come up over the forum while they walked, and it had been… good. But Aziraphale had disappeared into the dawn after they’d both sobered up, and Crowley had been left with nothing but the memory of his solid weight.

The loop stopped when they left the popina; began again. Crowley moved on.

The next scene he came upon in a dappled sunlit clearing, and it rang with the shouts of boatbuilders as they hammered the last planks onto the deck of the ark, and he saw himself sidling up to the angel. This time he strode past immediately, trying his hardest not to think about the great sheets of rain falling over the drowned lands, bloated bodies bobbing in the water. 

After that, a dusty roadside inn somewhere grey and cold-looking, and a brief conversation he barely remembered. Some Florentine parlour. A scriptorium in an abbey, Crowley leaning in an opened window. It had hurt just to do that, holiness like sparks against his skin, but worth it to see Aziraphale smear ink over a gilded manuscript when Crowley had said his name. 

A sushi restaurant in Soho, Aziraphale’s pleased wiggling in his seat as he dunked sashimi in soy sauce.

Loop after loop. Always the two of them.

He began running again past the scenes; past taverns and tearooms, an Elizabethan alleyway, a German castle, a longboat on the Irish sea. The bloody Bastille, Aziraphale’s elaborate outfit gleaming even in the darkness of a prison cell. Fuck. How many times had he fantasised about undoing all those buttons, parting that lace and brocade, rolling down those silk stockings and kissing his way down the inside of a calf. 

A mound of rubble, a flickering fire, a suitcase full of books passed from hand to hand. 

The Dowling estate, the two of them sharing a cigarette in a darkened garden. 

A thermos passed between their hands in the Bentley against the too-bright neon of Soho. Crowley had to avert his eyes from his own lost expression.

And then—a bandstand at dusk. They were yelling at each other. Not quite their last words, but near enough. 

He stopped there, saw Aziraphale’s expression crumble and fall, saw himself stalk away.

_ Have a nice doomsday. _

He wanted… he wanted so much, but what he wanted most of all was to say he was sorry, again; to say he hadn’t meant it, and that he knew his plan was terrible, and that he’d been desperate, and he just wanted it not to be over. He hadn’t meant to drive Aziraphale away. If they’d just have worked together they could have figured it out. And hadn’t they, in a way? Aziraphale had found the boy, and Crowley had gone to him, and he’d saved the world and put everything back. 

There was a future. That’s what he’d say, if he could step into the scene. They had a future. 

Aziraphale turned, and Crowley reappeared, and they played out the fight once more, in exactly the same way.

_ Who would bear the whips and scorns of time? _

Aziraphale’s face was a ruin as Crowley hissed at him, and Crowley now couldn’t stand it, that bruised expression, the .

“That’s enough,” he yelled, and his voice sounded loud and strange through the trees. “I don’t know what this is all supposed to mean, but I am done! I am fucking done! Aziraphale, you utter bastard, stop this right fucking now!”

For a moment, the bandstand wavered as though it was a picture projected on a sheet, and then it was gone.

What lay behind it wasn’t the garden though. It was the bookshop, although instead of the oculus overhead, a tree.  _ The tree.  _ The apple tree, somehow in full bloom and also full fruit, every branch heavy with perfect red apples.

Crowley saw himself, again. Sprawled on the bookshop floor, bottle of whiskey in one hand. His glasses off. He looked awful—eyes red-rimmed, face gaunt and hollow. A scarecrow with the stuffing pulled out.

As Crowley watched, Aziraphale walked into the room, and leaned over past-Crowley’s drunken form. His mouth moved, but Crowley-now couldn’t hear him any more than Crowley-then had. He reached out, tenderly, and brushed uselessly at Crowley’s hair, and a few days later and six thousand years earlier Crowley flinched back as if the touch had burned him. 

“Please. Stop it,” he said, his voice nothing more than apple-tree branches scratching together in the wind. 

The scene wavered as the others had, and it too fell away, leaving Crowley standing on a path leading through a meadow towards the tree. 

And beneath the tree, sitting on a tartan picnic blanket, another Aziraphale. 

Except. This was finally Aziraphale, the real Aziraphale, not some ghost. The angel was reading, head lowered over a heavy book in his lap. A small plate of cheese and fruit rested on the blanket next to a silver wine bucket. Two wine glasses. He was dressed in his modern clothes—that camel hair jacket, the neatly tied bow at his throat, brown oxfords that he’d taken off and set beside him on the picnic blanket. 

Crowley must have seen him in stocking feet before, surely, but now the sight of his feet tucked under his thighs felt like witnessing something illicit.

Crowley couldn’t move.

Overhead, the flock of birds wheeled in the sky, outlined against the perpetual storm clouds. Aziraphale was still for a time, before he delicately turned a page, and that simple movement set Crowley stumbling forward the few dozen steps between them.

“Aziraphale,” he creaked, and the fish-hook in his chest twisted like a knife. “Can’t believe you’re having a picnic without me.”

The angel was on his feet, the book tumbling from his lap to the ground, and Crowley barely had time to register that cavalier act before Aziraphale crossed the few steps between them. 

His hands grasped at Crowley’s biceps, fingers digging in almost painfully. “You’re here, it’s you, you’re really here this time—” 

“You didn’t make it easy for me,” Crowley began, but Aziraphale’s grip was implacable, pulling him closer. And then the angel lifted a hand on his face to pull his sunglasses off, and somehow Aziraphale’s mouth was—impossibly—on his, and they were kissing under an apple tree in the newborn world.


	11. The Opposite of Sacrifice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“There are other rituals,” the angel said. “Ones that aren’t about death and sacrifice. There are gifts you get to keep.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW for a brief consideration of self harm via holy water. 
> 
> Getting there, lads, getting there. Thanks for sticking with this strange sad story, it means more to me than I can say.
> 
> The prompt for this chapter was "ritual".

Crowley somehow was still standing, his legs hadn’t buckled, his lungs hadn’t collapsed in his chest. Aziraphale’s warm, soft mouth opened against his own; his tongue slid against Crowley’s lips, a hand that had been on his arm now on the back of his neck, pulling him closer until their bodies were pressed together.

He was so close that Crowley could barely make sense of it, it was incomprehensible that he was warm and alive and kissing him. He was here, he was real; pushing his fingers into Crowley’s hair and biting at his lower lip, making low hungry noises. Crowley kissed him back, desperately, curling his fingers around the lapels of Aziraphale’s waistcoat, the fish-hook in his chest exploding into hot rivulets of metal in his veins. Thousands of years of swallowed-down wanting bubbling through his skin. 

Aziraphale’s other hand slipped around his waist and pulled him even closer. It was—he was—they were—impossible—it was  _ impossible _ that Aziraphale wanted Crowley, wanted him in an altogether human way, a way that involved hands and mouths and tongues. Wanted him the same way that Crowley wanted. 

Beyond the taste of Aziraphale’s mouth and the pressure of his hands, some rational part of Crowley’s mind made an insistent objection. This was all too much, and he should stop kissing Aziraphale under the boughs of the apple tree—the literal tree of the knowledge of good and evil, in the literal Garden of fucking Eden—because he’d been gone and Crowley had been alone and they needed to go home.

He didn’t want to, he wanted to kiss Aziraphale forever. Wanted to kiss him as humanity invented bread and writing, as kingdoms rose and fell, as wars raged and heaven and hell schemed. Until the world ended, or didn’t. 

But they needed to go home.

The thunder boomed again and the air itself seemed to ripple like lake-water from a thrown stone. Crowley could feel the pressure of time building up like a headache, except it was more like a whole body ache, as if his bones were creaking under the strain. They needed to go. They weren’t meant to be here. 

With self control he didn’t know he had, he released his grip on Aziraphale’s waistcoat and pulled back. Just far enough to see Aziraphale blinking up at him, in a soft unfocused way, his lips parted, pink and wet, cheeks tinged with spots of red. From kissing and being kissed, in return, by Crowley. 

He tried to say something. The words wouldn’t come, wouldn’t unspool from his tongue. What could he say?  _ I missed you? _ As if Aziraphale had just ducked out to the shop to buy a packet of Hobnobs to have with his tea. As if  _ missed _ was the right word, as if  _ missed  _ was as vast as the ocean and as heavy. 

The fishhook in his chest twisted with the impossibility of that, of attempting to put the feeling into words in the air between them. Of putting any of it into words, the whole 6000 years, and the last few weeks. He’d been obliterated, and now he had been glued back together.

No. Apparently, he was going to just stand here staring at Aziraphale until the apocalypse rolled around again. Taking in every detail—the soft curve of his jaw, the pull of the waistcoat across the comfortable swell of his belly, the golden evening light catching in his hair. The way Aziraphale stared back, the rapid rise and fall of his chest.

And he desperately wanted his sunglasses back on, but he had no idea where they were. 

_ Say something, you idiot. _

“You.”  _ You were gone. You left me. You’ve been haunting me.  _ “You dropped your book.”

With that the spell was broken, and he could move, so he bent over and picked up the book and smoothed out the onionskin pages crumpled by the fall. He recognised it now. The heavy copy of Shakespeare's complete works, the one he’d last seen open on the bookshop floor. The same oxblood cover, burnished and worn from handling. 

He held it out.

Aziraphale looked down, took the book from Crowley’s grasp, and dropped it again. “Bugger the book. Give me your hand. Show me where you’re hurt.”

Crowley obeyed, unthinkingly, and held out his arm. Aziraphale turned his palm up between them, and pushed his sleeve down to expose the stained bandage around his wrist. With slow, precise movements, he unrolled the bandage carefully, revealing the jagged gash beneath, open and red and raw, still throbbing. A reminder of all that had happened: the plants. The memory. The fire. The price.

Then he closed his hand over the wound, and Crowley felt a prickle of angelic power across his arm, a brief burning that flared in his bones and was gone as quickly as it had come.  When he was done, a silvery scar ran down from Crowley’s wrist in place of the angry wound.

Crowley wasn’t sure that should be possible, an angel healing a demon’s occult wound, but then, it shouldn’t be possible that they were in the Garden of Eden. 

They were impossible things, both of them. 

And Aziraphale’s hand still, impossibly, curled around his. 

“I saw you, Crowley. I saw it all. I saw what happened to your plants, and your arm, and what that horrible woman did at the shop, and how Anathema tried to help you, and the Bentley. I saw it all, and I’m so very sorry.”

He had known that, already, that Aziraphale had been there, watching. But there was also something terrible about knowing he’d seen how desperate Crowley had been, how broken. He wanted to protest, to make it smaller.  _ Oh that? Yeah. Don’t worry about it. Don’t make it a thing. _

But Aziraphale had reached through time for him. Had called him here. Had kissed him.

He breathed in the smell of Eden, and breathed out the truth. “I’d do it again.”

He didn’t say: _ I will do it again, _ because he didn’t have to. He didn’t say:  _ I will do it again to get you home. _

Because there was no way back the way either of them had come. Which meant… one more toll to pay. One more sacrifice to make. And he knew exactly what sort of price the universe would exact for this last impossibility. 

Wasn’t there one scant mouthful of holy water in the thermos on his desk? 

Just enough. 

And Crowley knew with absolute certainty that he could reach out and take it, from across millennia, the way Aziraphale must have reached out for the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. He could unscrew the cap, and tip the holiest of holy water into his mouth, and open one last door. Give himself up, as the final offering. 

Aziraphale was watching him, and whatever he saw on Crowley’s face made his own turn horrified and angry.

Crowley knew if he was going to do it he better do it now, before he lost his nerve. He lifted his hand and reached out with his demonic powers— 

“No!” Aziraphale’s voice wasn’t his normal human voice, but the voice of commandment, echoing with hallowed harmonics. It stung against Crowley’s skin, made his ears ring, made the demon inside him want to hiss and strike. “No, Crowley! No more sacrifices!” 

Unbelievable, ridiculous, imperious bloody angel using that fucking celestial voice on him like some sort of party trick, as if he could just order Crowley about like that.

He opened his mouth to shout, to snap back, to strike. 

In the distance, the thunder boomed again. A gust of wind shook the apple tree, sending blossoms drifting down to the ground. One of them landed delicately in Aziraphale’s hair, and Crowley’s anger drained away, abruptly and dizzyingly as it had come on, and he was left wanting to suck his own words back into his own throat. But even here, in this strange loop of time, he couldn’t. 

Instead, he reached out, and took Aziraphale’s hands in his own. Felt skin over the bone. The angelic iron under soft skin. 

“It’s the only way I know to get you home.”

Aziraphale deflated too. He looked, Crowley saw now, worn and pale and tired. Grey stained beneath his eyes, and on another realm, his angelic aura was dim, like a banked fire instead of a wheeling inferno.

“I have to get you home."

“Do you think it would be any kind of home without you?” Aziraphale replied, so very softly.

“No.”

Birdsong and thunder. Time shivered and shimmered.

Aziraphale took another breath. He looked up towards the perpetually gathering storm and then turned his gaze back towards Crowley. “Do you know what the opposite of a sacrifice is?” he asked, but he didn’t wait for a response. Which was fine, because Crowley was utterly lost. But at least he was lost with Aziraphale. 

“There are other rituals,” the angel said. “Ones that aren’t about death and sacrifice. There are gifts you get to keep.”

Where their hands tangled together Crowley felt... something. A warmth spreading up his skin and within his skin. Within his bones and muscles and veins. A sensation like submerging his hands in something liquid and golden. Aziraphale’s essence, his ethereal self; curls and coils of energy, stroking against Crowley’s own occult form. 

Incandescent with his holiness, but also something else. A confession and a question.

A truth, and an offering of sorts, but not one that required blood or death or fire.

_ Do you? _

_ Yes. Of course, yes. _

He opened himself up, felt Aziraphale’s flowing warmth enfold his jagged sharpness. Felt the essence of him, every sunlit glimmering angelic atom (and other things too, unangelic things, wanting things, not so much shadows as places where the gleaming purity of Aziraphale’s celestial perfection had been worn into something else, something almost human. Honey wine, the ripe flesh of a pear, bodies pressed together). 

“I’ll put it right,” Aziraphale whispered, and let time go.

It rolled back in over them like a silent, invisible wave. The storm rushed in and broke overhead, impossibly fast, as if it had been building and building for however long Aziraphale had been holding everything in that loop. Fat heavy raindrops fell and lightning struck, and the wind rushed in and shook down the apple blossoms.

But Crowley didn’t feel the rain or see the flash of the lightning. Beneath the storm, he tumbled into Aziraphale’s glowing warmth, and Aziraphale fell into him in return, and the world went beautifully, perfectly white.


	12. How These Things Came About

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Crowley smiled when he spat fire at Gabriel, laughed at the angels who’d scattered out of his way as he’d walked away. He could still feel Aziraphale the whole time, knew that he had survived whatever bullshit holy water trial and punishment hell had planned._  
>  They just let him go. They were afraid, he’d made them afraid. He’d turned Aziraphale’s name into a legend. The angel who didn’t die. The sacrifice that didn’t burn. 
> 
> Things are set right, at last.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm playing fast and loose with canon and here. Just. Kondoing the shit out of it. Two canons diverged in the woods, and this one is all mine.  
> I am also throwing away linear conceptions of time and plot and so on. Who needs any of it.  
> The prompt for this update was _legends_ and I don't know if it fits but we’re 20,000 words in and the ending is in sight, so, I’ll throw that away too.  
> Also the rating on this has gone up from M to E. So yes, there is some smut happening here.

Everything happened at once.

~

Crowley hit the bookshop floor as the fire ripped around him, the flames undoing all of Aziraphale’s collecting and curating, the centuries of it, in a few terrible minutes. Sirens wailed somewhere nearby and he choked on thick smoke. The bookshop was hell, it glowed like hell as paper scraps and ash fell like blossoms from an apple tree.

The bookshop.

The bookshop was on fire. Again.

His mouth tasted of cinders.

He couldn’t, they couldn’t, not again. 

The enormity of it was beyond Crowley’s ability to grasp _(not again not again not again)._ His chest caved in, his bones cracked under the weight of it.

And then—

~

Sunset over the ocean and he curled his toes in the still-warm beach sand and looked out over the shifting, glimmering sea. All the endlessly changing hues of blue and green reaching towards a distant horizon. Beyond the vanishing point, France, Spain; then the swelling curve of northern Africa, then another vast ocean. He could see it in his mind, as if he was a seabird charting a journey home.

But he was already home. The endpoint of it all was here. And now. This was the centre of the world. 

“Do you want a chip, darling?” Aziraphale called from where he sat on a picnic blanket beyond the waves’ reach; jacket off, sleeves rolled up, an absurd straw hat perched by his side. “Only if you don’t come and eat some soon there’ll be none left.”

~

The ground shook, and a sound like the reality tearing in two echoed across the airfield. He fell to his knees as Satan, vast and terrible, unfurled against the bloody sky. 

“Come up with something! Or I’m never going to talk to you again!” The sword trembled in Aziraphale’s hand as he lifted it. He’d always been a reluctant warrior.

Crowley knew what to do, he’d done this before. He threw back his hands and _pulled_ and time fell away. 

_No more sacrifices._

~

The back of the angel’s neck glowed white gold and perfect in the sunlit kitchen. Crowley pressed his nose into the junction of neck and shoulder, and inhaled the smell of creme brulee and linen, the essence of angel. Distilled purity. Aziraphale wiggled back against him in response. 

“You smell good.”

“I’m beginning to think you have some sort of olfactory fixation,” Aziraphale said lightly. “You’re always going on about my scent.”

“Am not. Just like how you smell.”

What went unsaid: _I thought you were gone._

Aziraphale turned in his arms and caught Crowley’s face in his hands. 

“I like… the way you smell, too,” he murmured. Still unsure. This was new, this admitting, and speaking aloud. This touching. It still felt like a confession every time. 

“Course you do, I’m irresistible,” Crowley said, and leaned in to kiss him, and confess all over again. 

~

“Are you here?” 

“Good question. I’ve never done this before,” Aziraphale looked like a faded polaroid, insubstantial and distant against the pub windows. Crowley ached to reach for him, but knew his fingers would pass right through him. “It may not have worked out quite as I planned.”

“You were—the bookshop was on fire again… I thought you were gone again—” 

His expression was, briefly, agonised. “I’m so sorry, my dear. It appears time travel is an imprecise art.” 

“Where are you? Wherever you are, I’ll come to you.” 

“I’m nowhere right now,” Aziraphale’s eyes skittered up, as though looking at surroundings Crowley couldn’t see. “I just need to find a receptive body. Harder than you think.”

Crowley tried not to think that kiss they’d shared under the apple tree in Eden might be the only one. “You could—in me. I wouldn’t mind.”

“Ahh.” Aziraphale swallowed, and even faded and distant as he was, Crowley could see his cheeks redden slightly. “I wouldn’t want to risk it. We’ve still got to get to Tadfield, and who knows how unstable our essences would be, together? We could explode.”

~

“You fixed it,” the Antichrist said. He took a noisy bite of his apple, and kicked his heels against the low stone wall. He was just a boy, and he wasn’t. “It was so weird before. You were making everything weird. It was like… when someone heavy lies on a trampoline. And everything just rolls towards them. Bending the world. It was horrible, you were so sad.”

“Why didn’t _you_ just fix it?” Crowley asked, half in anger and half incredulity. The hellhound at Adam's feet growled faintly at his tone.

“Just couldn’t. I don’t make the rules,” the boy shrugged. 

“You do, you know.”

“Not about this, I didn’t. You had to fix it yourself.”

~

He reached for Aziraphale’s hand. The fluorescent lights on the bus ceiling cast a cold, greenish glow over the angel’s skin and he could see every vein beneath his skin, every line around his eyes, the draw of exhaustion around his mouth.

“You’d think after everything I wouldn’t be scared,” Aziraphale murmured, not quite to Crowley, not quite to himself. “And yet.”

He wanted to offer reassurances, but they felt too small and meagre. This hadn't happened the first time, they'd fallen off the edge of the map, ventured beyond the edges of the known, and all they had to guide them was a scrap of prophecy about choosing faces. 

“I know,” he said, instead. “But we’re together.”

~

Aziraphale’s head fell back on the pillow and he let out a low sound that might have been Crowley’s name or an exhortation to keep going.

As if Crowley had any intention of stopping, as if he wouldn’t have stayed here for hours, days, weeks, forever. Pressed inside Aziraphale, in this so very human moment of sweat and slick, hands tangled together over Aziraphale’s head. His hips bracketed by Aziraphale’s thighs, the obscene sound of their movements, skin on skin, as they rocked together.

He bent to bite at his mouth and lick at his jaw and Aziraphale sucked in a breath as it changed the angle of Crowley’s movements inside him.

It felt like he couldn’t get deep enough, ever. Even as he touched him he wanted to touch him more. Even as they fucked Crowley wanted to suck him off, wanted to lick up between his thighs and slide his tongue inside, wanted to kiss him endlessly, push into him with his fingers. 

“Tell me it’s good,” he whispered, trying to stop himself from biting harder on the curve of his shoulder, from leaving proprietary teeth marks up and down his throat.

“So good, so good,” Aziraphale’s eyes fluttered from half shut to closed then barely opened again, and he let out another moan. “You know it is.”

“Do I now?” Rocking was turning into a harder motion, Aziraphale lifting his hips up off the mattress, Crowley answering with rougher thrusts. He was racing towards the finish now, they both were, Aziraphale’s hard cock sliding against his belly with each movement. 

“You—you know, you do, you know I can’t get enough—” Aziraphale pulled his hands free to dig his fingers into Crowley’s hips, hard enough to bruise, urging him on. 

He knew. Aziraphale was a wanting, hungry thing too, he wanted the world and Crowley wanted to give it to him, endlessly. Picnics and lunches and long drives. Concerts and plays and art galleries. Second hand book fairs and little shops and quaint little tea shops.

And this too, the two of them together, he’d give him this—and take it too—as long as he could.

~

He walked out of Heaven, trying not to laugh.

~

“I’ll find someone, someone receptive, and we’ll meet in Tadfield. You know where,” the vision of Aziraphale said. 

The end of the world, once more. Awful possibilities circled in Crowley’s mind like carrion birds over a bloody battlefield.

What if this time went differently. What if this time the Antichrist decided no, actually, he’d really rather prefer turning the world into a radioactive brick, emptily circling a distant sun. 

“Can’t say I’m that keen to do all this again, angel.”

Aziraphale looked away, as though steadying himself, then looked back at Crowley with something like determination, that hard angelic glint back in his eyes. “I promise you… I promise you it’ll work. I won’t let you down again.”

“You haven’t,” Crowley whispered. “And you won’t.”

Aziraphale glanced away, frowning. “I have to go. Be careful, my dear.” And he was gone.

Crowley was tired, and afraid. But he wasn’t alone, anymore, and he could feel Aziraphale, that hook beneath his ribs, pulling him onwards. 

~

The first time they kissed was in Eden, under the apple tree, in a moment of broken time. Somewhere around their thirtieth (thirty seven to be exact) Crowley stopped counting. 

~

The solidity and softness of Aziraphale’s body surprised him with each step, even hours after they’d slid into each other, even after the whole ordeal was over.

Somehow he kept his hands to himself, even as he wanted to press his palms into Aziraphale’s thighs and the lovely roundness of his belly, reach up and feel the place where his curls brushed his neck, lick the palm of his hand so he would know exactly what it tasted like. Tried not to think about the skin beneath the layers of cashmere and cotton. 

He didn’t look back. As Orpheus should have done, except his Eurydice wasn’t behind him. He was there on the park bench when Crowley arrived at St James. Sitting far too straight for the demon he was impersonating, hands clasped together.

For a moment Crowley looked at him, Aziraphale in Crowley, but still somehow himself. 

“Hey,” Crowley said. The angel turned, and smiled, lit them both up with a different kind of burning.

~

The Bentley sat perfect and gleaming across from the bar.

He opened the door, sat behind the wheel and flexed his fingers on the leather. And then he pushed down the sleeve of his right hand. 

A silver line traced down his skin, in between tendons and veins, a scar where there’d never been one before. He touched his finger to the line, followed the tributary of raised tissue down towards the crook of his elbow. 

The car growled into life, and Freddy began singing.

“ _I have spent all my years in believing you.”_

Crowley gripped the wheel, remembered what was going to happen next, and took a deep breath. Pressed his foot down on the accelerator and drove towards the future.

~

The worst of it was that they expected him to step into the fire himself. To destroy himself utterly, without so much as a pretense of a trial. That smug prick Gabriel actually thought Aziraphale would immolate himself on cue. 

Crowley smiled when he spat fire at Gabriel, laughed at the angels who’d scattered out of his way as he’d walked away. He could still feel Aziraphale the whole time, knew that he had survived whatever bullshit holy water trial and punishment hell had planned. 

They just let him go. They were afraid, he’d made them afraid. He’d turned Aziraphale’s name into a legend. The angel who didn’t die. The sacrifice that didn’t burn. 

~

He reached for the strawberry lolly and the Mr Whippy—with a flake, it wouldn’t be the same without the flake—with an familiar but unfamiliar hand, the signet ring heavy on his smallest finger. He glanced sidelong at his own face, wondering how it felt for Aziraphale’s expansiveness to be caught up in his narrow sharpness. 

“Your trousers are so very tight,” Aziraphale said in Crowley’s voice. “No wonder you’re so grumpy sometimes.”

“I’ll show you grumpy,” Crowley said in return. It felt good, to tease and be teased, just for a moment. 

“I expect you shall.” 

Crowley looked around the park. “How’s the car?” He circled protectively around Aziraphale—Aziraphale wearing his face, wearing his skin, like he belonged there, inside Crowley, which was too much to think about right now.

“Not a scratch on it. How’s the bookshop?”

“Not a smudge. Not a book burned.”

A tall dark figure appeared on the edge of the park, his robes the colour of night, and Crowley knew the final payment was due.

~

In the dark of Crowley’s bedroom, Aziraphale traced slow, gentle circles on the back of his hand with a thumb. Then he pushed down Crowley’s sleeve to reveal that thin silver scar, barely visible in the grey light of dawn.

“Did it hurt?” Aziraphale said, softly. Crowley wasn’t sure if he meant the wound, the blood he’d shed, or everything else. The whole fucking thing; the plants and the Bentley and the vampire and the lost memory and the door and the fire. 

_Yes,_ he wanted to say, _yes it hurt, it hurt like a bastard._ _But you’re here now._ The pain of it had receded like floodwater soaking into the earth. Gone, but he’d always know where it scoured through him. 

“I’ve had worse.” 

Aziraphale made a noise that suggested he wasn’t quite convinced. But his hand kept tracing the scar. _“Let me speak to th' yet-unknowing world, how these things came about.”_

Crowley tried not to wince. “Might have had enough bloody and unnatural acts for now, angel.”

The windows were beginning to glow with the dull grey light of dawn. Soon, heaven and hell would come looking for them, but for just a few moments, the world was still and peaceful. Unknowing. And always would be, of how near it had teetered to disaster. 

This close, Crowley could feel Aziraphale’s breath on his skin, but they needed to be closer still.

_Do you?_

_Yes. Of course, yes._

~

It was over. It was finally over. They touched hands and flowed past each other back into their own skins. Aziraphale was gold and warm and perfect.

Crowley shifted inside his own skin, felt other things click too. Time, forced back into place like a dislocated limb, leaving an ache behind. But not a mortal wound, not any more.

“Let me tempt you to lunch,” Crowley said, and Aziraphale gave a delighted wiggle. 

“Temptation accomplished. What about the Ritz? I do believe a table for two has just miraculously come free.” 

And it had.


	13. Wondrous Strange

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“It’s rather magical, don’t you think?” Aziraphale said, looking at a small child in a pram with both a lolly and a balloon and an expression of rapture on its tiny, filthy face._  
>  _“It’s just an ordinary Thursday to them,” Crowley replied, without any bite._  
>  _Aziraphale thought about it for a moment, before he caught Crowley’s fingers in his. “No,” he said. “I think they know, somehow, that something wondrous has happened.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have listened to every cover version of Duran Duran’s Ordinary World available on Spotify and the best one is by Joy Williams. The Gregorian Chant is bad. The Pavarotti version is unspeakable.  
> This chapter is wholly unnecessary but I felt like we needed another happyish ending, so here it is. The prompt for this last week was magic.  
> Thank you to Racketghost for the prompts, and a huge heartfelt extra thank you to Princip1914 for talking me down off many many ledges as I was writing this.  
> And thank _you_ for reading this fever-dream of a fic.

The bookshop wasn’t haunted. Crowley had already walked through it, this morning, in Aziraphale’s skin, and he knew whatever ghosts it held were phantoms of memory. The only thing that moved in the bookshop was an angel, and dustmotes eddying in the air. 

But he still hesitated at the doorway. 

Aziraphale turned. He was a few steps further in, bright against the dark interior, glowing in white and cream. Moth pale, moonlight pale, an after-image against Crowley’s too-sensitive retina. 

He was not a ghost. He was flesh and blood, or near enough anyway. 

“Are you coming in?” 

“Yeah just.” Crowley called a pack of cigarettes and a matchbook into being in his jacket pocket and pulled them out. “I know you don’t like me smoking near the books.”

Aziraphale must have known it was a ploy for time but he didn’t say anything, just stood, considering. “Red or something stronger, when you’re done?” he asked at last.

Crowley lit the cigarette, pulled in a long drag. He just needed a moment. Just a few minutes, to catch his breath. “Whatever you like, angel.”

“All right. I’ll just … take a look around, and then I’ll find a bottle of something nice. To celebrate.” 

Never mind that they’d already polished off three bottles of Pol Roger already at the Ritz. 

Afterward they’d walked back, slowly, quietly. Cautious with each other in a way that Crowley wasn’t sure he liked; Aziraphale seeming almost too gentle, too solicitous. 

Crowley had thought, briefly, about doing something spectacularly irritating—like setting off the sprinklers in the Ritz as they left, or causing a few traffic jams, or snapping up parking tickets for every car from Slough to Dartford—just to get a reaction.

But he hadn’t. 

Instead they’d walked back across town, up Old Bond Street, avoiding Piccadilly Circus for being too touristy, through Chinatown; neither of them saying much. 

The sky had turned a pale pearly blue as the sun dipped lower; a soft and gentle breeze soughed through the streets, and if the world resented everything that had happened it gave no sign. Music played through open windows and even the city’s constant hum of traffic and lingering smell of exhaust seemed lighter, less oppressive. Everything felt fresh and unspoiled, the colours somehow more vivid, and everywhere around them people on the street laughed and smiled. 

“It’s rather magical, don’t you think?” Aziraphale said, looking at a small child in a pram with both a lolly and a balloon and an expression of rapture on its tiny, filthy face. 

“It’s just an ordinary Thursday to them,” Crowley replied, without any bite. 

Aziraphale thought about it for a moment, before he caught Crowley’s fingers in his. “No,” he said. “I think they know, somehow, that something wondrous has happened.” 

Crowley hadn’t been able to argue with that, so they’d walked in easy silence up Greek Street toward the bookshop, restored in all its tattered, dusty glory. 

And that had been good. 

But still Crowley stood outside, and smoked his cigarette slowly. Tried to look through the windows, without seeming obvious, as Aziraphale drifted through the shop. He stopped every now and again to lightly touch a book, to consider something out of place, no doubt daring it to be restored wrong so he could have something to complain about later.

Crowley already knew what would happen when he went inside, and Aziraphale did too, although it had the quality of something that had happened decades, maybe centuries earlier. A vanishing memory, the details fading like an old photograph exposed to the light. He wasn’t sure now if he would smoke another cigarette or go straight inside. Wasn’t sure what tomorrow would bring, or next week, or next month, or a century for now, beyond vague impressions. 

Maybe he just wasn’t supposed to remember. Maybe remembering what was going to happen was too much, even for a demon. He’d have to ask Aziraphale what he thought.  One day soon when they drove to the seaside and had fish and chips on the beach. One day as they sat licking salt from their fingers, listening to the waves rise and fall, Crowley would say something like, yeah and hey, that was a bit weird, wasn’t it? How it all faded? And Aziraphale would agree, and they’d both stare into the distance, and then Aziraphale would take his hand and it wouldn’t matter.

Or at least, he thought that’s what might happen.  _ Hoped.  _

He sucked on the cigarette, drew the hot smoke into his lungs. Tried not to think about the taste of smoke from other fires. 

Inside, the angel stepped out of sight behind a shelf, and Crowley felt an abrupt, dizzying rush of panic that he couldn’t see him. He could feel him, yes, but he  _ needed _ to see him. 

He snapped away what was left of the cigarette and strode into the bookshop, stalked through the stacks. Aziraphale stood a few rows back, standing utterly still with one hand on a too-familiar oxblood leather-bound book, half-pulled out from the row. 

“Hey,” Crowley said, softly.

Aziraphale looked up at him, and his face lit up as it always did the first time they saw each other, even as he pushed the book back into place. “Ah. Crowley.” 

(As if he hadn’t seen him for some time, as if they hadn’t been together for hours, as if Crowley hadn’t been literally inside Aziraphale, and the other way around, for hours before that. As if they hadn’t laid chastely on Crowley’s bed in the predawn dark, fingers and knees touching. 

As if they both didn’t know what was coming next.) 

“That’s me,” Crowley replied, stupidly. 

Aziraphale turned, fluttered his hands to his waistcoat to smooth down the velvet as he’d done a thousand times before. Crowley was not the only nervous one, then.

“I couldn’t decide on a wine, perhaps you could—” 

“Don’t really feel like anything else to drink.” His heart was trying to drum down into his viscera, hammer its way out past his spine.

“No. I don’t either, really.”

Which one of them would be the brave one this time? 

Aziraphale. Aziraphale would, again. He stepped closer. Took a breath. Half lifted his hand, before breathing a question between them. “May I?” 

Crowley nodded, and Aziraphale lifted his glasses off with infinite care, and then laid them down on the shelf beside him. 

“Is it...very difficult, being back here?” 

Crowley opened and shut his mouth over a sharp retort, the habit of millennia, of teasing and being teased. This time he needed to say something real, for a change, now that honesty was no longer too dangerous to consider. 

“Wouldn’t say difficult exactly. Not compared too, you know. Being here without you.”

Aziraphale considered that, and then stepped closer again, so they were almost but not quite touching. 

“I’d like to… make amends. For that. For leaving. And for… the other things that happened.”

He sketched a vague shape in the air and Crowley didn’t have to ask what  _ other things _ he meant. 

“There’s nothing for you to make amends for, angel. Absolutely nothing.”

Aziraphale looked like he might argue with that, because he was still a bastard, but then he didn’t. Instead, he moved closer again, and put a hand out, and splayed his fingers across Crowley’s chest.

(Crowley knew this wasn’t the end of it, and that they’d have to talk about  _ six thousand years _ and  _ we’re not friends  _ again and again. And Aziraphale would lay out all his sins, all the ways he felt he’d wronged Crowley over the years, and Crowley would refuse forgiveness, because for starters he wasn’t in the forgiving business, and as for the rest of it, there was nothing to forgive. They’d both done what they needed to do, to survive. And one day, he knew Aziraphale would understand that. Even as his memories of the future turned into smoke, Crowley knew. It would be all right. It would take time, but it would be all right.)

But now… but now. Now was for something else, and Crowley didn’t want to wait any more. 

“So. Are you going to kiss me again?”

Instead of replying, Aziraphale studied Crowley for what seemed like an uncomfortably long time. Finally, whatever he saw it seemed sufficient, and he closed his hand in the fabric of Crowley’s shirt, and caught his mouth in his. 

For a moment it was soft and sweet, then Aziraphale pulled him closer again. Drew him in, so they were pressed against each other, and opened his mouth wide beneath Crowley’s. Demanding, but still gentle. Implacable, an onslaught Crowley wouldn’t have been able to resist even if he’d wanted to. 

But he wanted the opposite of resistance. He wanted them to touch in every way possible, human skin to human skin, unnecessary hearts beating in time, bones and blood and muscles moving together. 

Wanted to pull Aziraphale into his body, tell him to make a home there. (Tell him he always had, and always would have, a home in Crowley.)

Without speaking, they somehow made it to the sofa, until Aziraphale kneeling over Crowley, slowly tugging at the neckline of his shirt so he could put his mouth on the muscle that ran from his neck to shoulder, pulling it further to press further wet kisses into his chest. 

Crowley let his own hands roam down his expanse of velvet-swathed back and then under the layers of clothes to get at his skin, pulling up layers of fabric so he could touch him, finally, finally. Fingertips to the curve of him. Just tracing the smoothness of his skin as Aziraphale kissed his way lower, until Crowley’s shirt got in the way. One or the other of them pulled it off, before Crowley remembered Aziraphale’s endless buttons, and the bow-tie too, and he caught it in his fingers and for a moment he was holding another tartan silk ascot— 

But he didn’t want to think about that, there’d be time for that later too, so he set it aside, tugged the bloody tie off and threw it on the floor, then set to work on Aziraphale’s vest, and shirt, and everything else. Buttons and zips and then layers of denim and wool and cotton, pulled hastily down and discarded on the floor.

Finally, there was nothing between them at all, and Aziraphale was soft and solid between his thighs, all white hair and pink creeping flush rising up his chest, the only hard part of him a rigid length against Crowley’s answering erection.

Aziraphale looked down at him with a delighted smile. “You’re a wonder.”

Crowley wanted to argue— _ no, it’s you— _ but Aziraphale ran his hand down Crowley’s belly, then lower, to take them both in his hand and touch them together, and he was too lost in the haze of pleasure to say anything. 

There was only the now, Aziraphale’s hand on him moving in steady, electric strokes, their foreheads pressed together and ragged breath mingling. Crowley curled his own hand around Aziraphale’s, and they fell into each other in a completely different way, into a long golden now.

The bookshop wasn’t haunted, and what moved in it was not a ghost, but two bodies. Hands and mouths and skin, making a minor and human kind of magic, suspending time for a few perfect moments.

Outside the bookshop, it was an ordinary Thursday, and the world went painfully, joyfully on. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can find me in the wilds of tumblr at [antikate](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/antikate). Come say hi anytime!


End file.
